Have you ever put off for tomorrow what you could do today? Surely yes. Continually delaying our tasks is a very human habit that we know as procrastination. No one is safe, and lately it’s a lot easier to fall for it. The generalization of teleworking due to the covid-19 pandemic, for example, is posing a challenge in order to avoid the temptations to procrastinate, something that technologies do not help either. For many people, being able to focus on a task in front of the computer, without the pressure of feeling observed by bosses or colleagues, and with a thousand and one distractions within the reach of a click (an e-mail that arrives, a notification on social networks, a quick review to see the news of the day) is an impossible mission.
The worst part is that procrastination, in general, makes us feel bad . It is not the same to plan a relaxed afternoon that consists of lounging on the sofa or watching series or your mobile phone, than knowing that you have tasks to do and watching the hours go by without making any progress at all.
Although procrastination has always been linked to poor time organization, in recent years several psychological studies have been published that attribute this phenomenon to a problem of managing emotions and not time. The idea is that the task we are putting off makes us feel bad for some reason (perhaps because it is boring or too difficult), and to feel better in the moment (not in the long term), we start doing something else, like watching videos . In fact, there is even a study, published in 2015 in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, that thoroughly analyzes the reasons for the resounding success of kitten videos on YouTube.
In any case, the truth is that we do not like to procrastinate, but sometimes we lack tools to fight against temptation. In their book Procrastination: Why You Do It, What to Do About It Now , psychologists Jane Burka and Lenora Yuen offer some strategies for breaking the bad habit of procrastinating on important tasks. Some of these techniques may work for you:
