Always putting off work until the deadline? Three ways to help you cure workplace procrastination

One less nail, one horseshoe lost, one less horseshoe, one group of war horses lost, one warhorse missing, one battle lost, one battle lost, and one country lost.

This is a famous western proverb. It comes from a historical story that in 1485, King Richard III of England and Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, were preparing to fight to the death for the dominion of England. Who would have thought that because of the delay of the groom and the blacksmith, Richard III's warhorse had an iron nail missing from the shoe, and because of this iron nail, Richard III was defeated and lost a country.

This story tells us that procrastination can sometimes be fatal.

Always putting off work until the deadline? Three ways to help you cure workplace procrastination

In the workplace, many of us procrastinate and make procrastination a habit. The plan always arrives the night before the deadline, and it is completed in a hurry, and then the next day I go to work listlessly with panda eyes who stay up all night; when customers report problems, they always delay first, waiting for the customers to be red-eyed before rushing to work. to deal with...

We are always busy putting out fires and rushing to the market. It is conceivable that how can work efficiency and work enthusiasm be high? How can I get the job done?

Why do we suffer from workplace procrastination?

First, we always give ourselves negative cues.

Labeling is all the rage these days. Not only food has labels, items have labels, and different people will be labeled differently. The appearance of labels, on the one hand, brings us convenience and allows us to quickly recognize people and things. But on the other hand, labels also make us form a fixed mindset.

Procrastination is a classic label. Because work is always done before deadlines, I am a procrastinator; because I am a procrastinator, work is always done before deadlines. Did you see it? Because we label ourselves procrastination, then all our actions will unconsciously conform to the label we set for ourselves, which will form a closed loop of no solution.

Second, we get causality wrong.

We always think that actions lead to results, that we procrastinate so that tasks are not completed. In fact, this is not the case. The truth is that our psychological expectations of the results affect our behavior.

It doesn't sound very easy to understand, just give an example and you will understand.

Always putting off work until the deadline? Three ways to help you cure workplace procrastination

Why are few of us late in the morning? Because we know we'll be fined for being late, and fines hurt, so we won't be late. Our expectations of outcomes, expectations of fines for lateness to work, influence our choices and actions. The road is too congested, I don't want to crowd the bus with many people, I have to go out early. The weather forecast says it will rain tomorrow, so you have to go out an hour earlier.

You see, anticipation of outcomes clearly affects our behavior.

Then why do you keep delaying the report? Because the 15th is still a few days away, don't worry; because I can get it done in three hours, don't worry. We set the date for submitting the report to the 15th, which is our psychological expectation, so we will not act until that day. So, if we change our mental expectations a little bit, our behavior will be completely different.

So how can you break the habit of procrastinating at work? You might as well try these three tricks!

First of all, we have to tear off our own labels and give ourselves a hint of positive psychology.

Tear off the label is a painful process, because it is a process of changing our inherent thinking. When it comes to procrastination, don't imply that you are a procrastinator, and don't often tell others that I am a procrastinator. Don't make excuses for procrastinating on things you haven't done.

We didn't do a task, either because we didn't manage time well, or because we didn't pay attention to this task. In short, don't involve procrastination, find out the specific cause of the specific problem, and then solve it.

Keep giving yourself positive hints: I am a person who pursues efficiency and does things quickly. Do things the way you want to be who you want to be, imagine how a person who pursues efficiency would do things, and you do the same.

In addition to this method, we can use the miracle rhetorical method. What is the miracle rhetorical method? In the workplace, there must be such a moment, when you complete the task ahead of time, think about how you felt at that time? Is it easy and enjoyable?

Always putting off work until the deadline? Three ways to help you cure workplace procrastination

Because you completed the task ahead of time, you won't catch an emergency fire, and because you have a lot of time to prepare, you have completed it very well, and the boss praised you for the first time. Think about the feeling of completing tasks ahead of time and not procrastinating. It is best to be specific, because the more specific and detailed, the better you feel. Use these positive feedbacks to make positive suggestions to yourself, forming a positive cycle. .

The second is managing our expectations of outcomes and using them to influence our actions.

The leaders asked us to submit the annual summary on the 15th, so we moved the date forward to the 10th. Because the end of the year, there are a lot of things, if you drag it to the end, you don't know what will change, so prepare in advance.

After we have this expectation in mind, we need to list the task of writing the summary in the plan, and write down the deadline on the 10th in the plan. After it is written on the paper, it will also have a psychological hint for us, and we only want to do it when it is listed in the plan. If it is not listed, we will often forget the existence of this task.

Third: Do the hardest thing first.

Many times, we procrastinate because we feel that the task is too difficult, requires too much energy, and requires a lot of brain cells, and the brain will resist instinctively. Work comes to the end, which is why we procrastinate.

In response to this problem, we also have two methods: one is to decompose the task, and the other is to do the most difficult thing first.

Task decomposition, as everyone knows, is to decompose a difficult task into several small tasks and do them every day. Then the more difficult and heavier tasks will be decomposed, and we will not feel that the task is heavy.

Doing the hard things first is a form of reinforcement called Prima's Law in psychology. At work, when we finish the easy things first, we will strengthen our understanding of the difficult things. We feel that the thing is too difficult, and the more difficult it is, the more we don’t want to do it.

Doing the difficult things first and the things you don’t want to accomplish first will improve our work efficiency, enhance our work ability, and gain a sense of achievement and satisfaction. We will find that this task is actually not that difficult. This strengthening effect will become stronger and stronger, making us more confident and expressive at work!