The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way by Hillary Rettig

Author:Hillary Rettig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: selfhelp, career advice, activism, procrastination

Chapter 22: Defeating Your Fears: The Process in Detail

Let’s look at each step of the Fear Defeating Process individually.

Step 1. Use Mission Management and Time Management to establish reasonable goals and a reasonable schedule.

By now, hopefully, you understand the importance of Mission Management and Time Management, and won’t be tempted to skip those steps. I won’t repeat the information in Parts I and II of this book—just remind you that setting reasonable goals and a reasonable schedule is the primary catalyst of success, while setting unreasonable goals and an unreasonable schedule, or no goals and no schedule, is the primary catalyst of failure.

Step 2. Start your work: catch yourself procrastinating.

To deal with your procrastination, you need to be able to catch yourself in the act of doing it. This step will either be very easy or very hard, depending on how deeply you “zone out” when you procrastinate.

As mentioned earlier, many people enter a kind of trance when they procrastinate—that trance is the whole point of the procrastination, really, as it allows you to avoid doing your work without experiencing pain or guilt. (Those come later, when you look back at your wasted day.) When you’re in that trance, you’re only dimly aware of what you are doing, and the hours just seem to melt away.

Some people don’t enter too deeply into the trance. They can be in the middle of an unscheduled video game and think, “Oops! I’m procrastinating.” If you can do that relatively quickly, then you’ve completed this step.

If, however, you are one of those people who really zones out, it may take some time and practice for you to reliably catch yourself early in the act of procrastinating. One thing that may help is to get into the habit of asking yourself, at fifteen- or thirty-minute intervals, “Am I doing what I’m supposed to be doing, or am I procrastinating?”

Keep working at it, and eventually you’ll be able to quickly and reliably catch yourself in the act of procrastinating.

Step 3. Don’t criticize or berate or shame yourself!

As I’ve said many times in The Lifelong Activist, self-criticism does nothing to solve your procrastination problem, and instead is likely to make it worse. Don’t do it.

Instead of criticizing yourself, be an objective, compassionate observer and analyst of your own behavior. Tell yourself, “Oh, I’m procrastinating.” Do not even add a mildly negative phrase such as, “Too bad.”

Step 4. Start journaling.

You have caught yourself procrastinating: now’s the time to figure out why. Your main tool for doing this is journaling, which will help you (a) defuse your panic, (b) characterize the precise nature of your obstacles, and (c) come up with solutions for overcoming those obstacles. Journaling isn’t hard, but there are a few tricks to it that I’ll share with you in Chapter 23. The important thing to note here is that the moment you catch yourself procrastinating, you should stop whatever you are doing and begin journaling.6

There are many ways of journaling, incidentally, but the one I

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.