The true and surprising reasons behind why we procrastinate.
If you are anything like me, procrastination has been a part of your life for what feels like forever. Whether you start new personal projects seemingly every few days only to abandon them after a week, whether you start your school assignments or work-related projects close to the deadline and finish them in a rush, or whether you make yourself busy with pointless tasks to avoid taking on the most important ones, chances are that you procrastinate at least in some areas of your life.
And if that’s the case, then you might have heard that you simply are lazy. You should just work, start projects, and push forward even if things get hard. Maybe you have proffered that judgment in the past. After all, that’s quite a common piece of knowledge. At least it was for me.
1. A Perspective Shift
With that way of thinking, I was in for quite a perspective shift when I read The Now Habit, by Neil Fiore. The starting point of that book is the hypothesis that procrastination is not a character defect. In other words, you don’t procrastinate because you are lazy. If you did, you would procrastinate in all areas…