Page 21 - End Procrastination Now Get it Done with a Proven Psychological Approach

End Procrastination with a Three-Step Approach xix

Different people procrastinate for different reasons and in dif-
ferent ways. Some postpone decisions where there is no guarantee
for success; others find creative ways to delay and put off unpleas-
ant tasks. Persistent forms of procrastination are serious problems
for hundreds of millions of people, especially for those who tie
their self-worth to their performance and whose procrastination
may also contribute to stress-related health problems.
I don’t know anyone who chooses to develop a procrastination
habit. This would be like choosing depression over emotional
health. Choice comes into play when you recognize that you can
either take corrective action or do nothing and hope for the best.
Choose to change, and it is your responsibility to take corrective
action. However, change is also a process, not an event, and I’ll tell
you more about that in Chapter 1.

Changing the Procrastination Habit

If procrastination is an automatic habit, are you stuck? Fortunately,
you have alternative choices that you can employ against procras-
tination. Changing erroneous thinking (the cognitive way), devel-
oping tolerance for discomfort (the emotive way), and graduated
exposure (the behavioral way) can disable procrastination and pre-
vent recurrences.
In “The Road Not Taken,” the American poet Robert Frost
showed the inevitability of choice. He wrote the poem to describe
the dilemma of a friend who, after choosing one path, would fret
because he had not traveled the other. Frost’s poem knocks at the
door of human inquisitiveness, and its last verse is among the
most frequently quoted: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the differ-
ence.” Here we see an interesting example of how we can view the
automatic habit of procrastination as being tempered by the idea
of choice.