The sun is dwindling and you’re thinking of ending your day. You shut down your computer, turn off the light, and leave your office with a sigh… that big task will just have to wait for tomorrow.
If you’re inclined to put things off for tomorrow that you could do today… you just may have a problem with procrastination.
You aren’t alone.
Everyone procrastinates from time to time. 88% of the workforce admit that they procrastinate at least one hour a day (and quite often much more!) But just because procrastination is a universal issue, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a major problem.
Procrastination goes beyond work, and can interfere with a number of areas in your life:
In fact, a University of Calgary study shows that procrastinators perform more poorly than their less-likely to procrastinate counterparts… which you’d expect. However, they also are more likely to feel unhappy, waste money on taxes and other expenses, suffer from medical issues related to neglect, and put off important financial decisions like investing and saving for retirement. All of these things have a major impact on your life.
Before we can dig into the cause of procrastination, as well as the solution to the epidemic, it’s helpful for you to identify the activities that you’re likely to do when you’re procrastinating.
Scroll through social media
Binge watch mediocre television
Take a nap
Clean or do household chores
Organize with color-coded lists
Over-research the task
Extreme perfectionism
Snack… everyone needs to eat, right?
Do anything but the task at hand
Now, it’s a commonly held view that if you procrastinate, you just didn’t manage your time well. Or that you’re lazy, undisciplined, unmotivated or distracted. Many even think that procrastination is a problem with your willpower.
But in reality, procrastination isn’t any of those. It’s really an emotional issue.
Sometimes our brain uses procrastination as a helpful tool. It’s an involuntary, subconscious protection trigger to help you avoid dealing with a potentially painful or uncomfortable experience.
Whether you’re consciously procrastinating, or unconsciously avoiding an emotion… the results are the same. The damage from procrastination doesn’t just stop with blowing a few deadlines and disappointing yourself and others.
Procrastination is when you consciously or unconsciously delay a required action or deadline, despite the fact that this delay is harmful towards achieving your goals.
Well, based on the latest brain research, 95% of the time, people procrastinate to avoid certain emotions and feelings.
Procrastination is a coping strategy to help us deal with emotions we aren’t ready to face or simply, we do not know how to deal with them.
Since your brain is focused on what is happening right now, it automatically sends messages to you to avoid and move away from any situation that causes even the slightest emotional anxiety or stress... even if it results in greater anxious feelings and even more stress later.
And the real kicker is, procrastination hurts you in more than one way. By procrastinating you’re not only
avoiding negative emotions now in exchange for potentially greater ones later… you’re also
depriving yourself of the positive emotions and feelings that come from accomplishment, success and a job well done.
So in fact, you’re increasing the negative experiences in your life and decreasing the positive ones… yet you still do it. How many times have you pursued short term pleasure to avoid short term discomfort?
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Have you seen this image before? It’s a graphic representation of how many total months we all have to live. Even if you live an above average lifespan to 90 years old, you still have just 1,080 months. Chances are you’ve already burned through a lot of it.
Photo Credit waitbutwhy.com
It’s a sobering exercise, isn’t it? I don’t know of a better way to demonstrate the real cost of procrastination.
It wastes TIME... the most precious resource and asset that we have. Time to focus on achieving our goals and dreams, and time to fully enjoy those achievements. Time with our families and friends. Time to make a positive impact in the world.
Even if you’re in the early stages of your life, you’ve already used a couple hundred of your 1,080 boxes… there’s definitely not enough time to do everything you’d love to do. Which means there’s definitely not enough time for mindless, needless procrastination.
"Procrastination is the thief of time."
~Edward Young
Just think about all the time you’ve spent NOT doing the things that were most important, most profitable and most success driving…you can actually attribute a dollar figure to your procrastination!
Notice in the chart above how your earnings potential can take a hit due to procrastination. If you can bill $50 an hour for your efforts, that's $50 lost for every hour you spend procrastinating. In a typical workday, that adds up to quite a lot of lost revenue. Even one hour a day of procrastination each workday adds up to $250 a week lost to social scrolling or viral videos.
The real cost of procrastination runs much deeper. When you procrastinate you create and reinforce disempowering negative patterns in your life.
Procrastination Causes:
And all of these emotions… just lead to further procrastination and an identity of being a procrastinator. It’s a downward spiral of self-sabotaging behavior that we simply ignore, or even make jokes about!
Q: What’s a procrastinator’s busiest day of the week?
A: Tomorrow!
When you suffer from habitual procrastination you’re letting yourself down in a multitude of ways, and leaving a whole lot of potential income and success in the path of destruction. The cost of Procrastination adds up especially when you also consider what it does to your personal identity:
So let’s turn this around.
Knowing that procrastination isn’t a time management problem, but rather an emotional and mindset issue, should set off some ah-has.
This is the reason all of your efforts to crush the procrastination habit in the past haven’t worked. Making lists, developing discipline, buying new planners and organizers, setting timers and checklists all fail because they don’t address the root cause of procrastination.
Real, lasting change comes from retraining your brain to deal with those negative or disempowering emotions and feelings before your procrastination even starts.
It’s a big word, but a simple concept: neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change itself through new neural connections, based on repeated actions.
Scientists used to believe the brain became “hard-wired” after just 2-3 years of life. Now, we know that isn’t true: the brain can change its structure based on how you use it — basically, the brain is just another muscle you can work out and mold.
Think about it this way: when you hear the word “cow,” “milk” probably springs to mind. The word “cherry” likely does not. But if you were to repeat the words cow and cherry together every day, the two will quickly become linked in your mind.
And your brain can do that for all kinds of connections, as long as you utilize techniques that target a particular goal. Stroke patients have used specialized neuroplasticity techniques to recover from partial paralysis. Meditators have grown their grey matter and shrunk their amygdalas just by being mindful.
And you can rewire your brain to stop procrastinating using neuroplasticity… precisely, using Inncercises.™
Innercises are a set of neuroplasticity techniques that are specifically designed to stop procrastination in its tracks.
This cutting edge set of techniques and tools will teach your brain how to break all your negative habits of thought, perceptions, and behaviors. Once you’ve discovered your root cause of procrastination, you’ll just need to make a 20-minute commitment per day to change how your mind works.
And this method isn’t just a bunch of hocus pocus “brain games” we came up with over lunch. It uses a proprietary combination of scientifically studied methods, including:
Each level of the All New Winning The Game of Procrastination Program comes with a Powerful Innercise Brain Training Audio, a Knowledge and Skills Video, Worksheets and a few surprise bonuses.
Here's what inside each level:
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Double or triple your productivity in a week, and:
As you advance through the program you’ll continue to unlock additional life changing content… all of which have been personally created or hand selected by me to optimize your experience and help you achieve life changing results.
These bonuses are designed to accelerate your progress through the program and get you from mere goal setting to goal achievement faster and easier than ever before!
Wake up every day and know you won’t let anything pull you off track when it comes to your most important projects, tasks and goals.
No more wasting time on Netflix binges watching shows you really don’t want to watch. Losing hours of your life with cat videos, playing endless hours of solitaire, and maybe even that too-spotless kitchen where all of your spices are alphabetized will be gone from your life. Instead of hearing the siren song of social media, you’ll be pulled towards achieving your goals and dreams. You’ll work on that novel you’ve been planning, or finally take those Spanish lessons.
You’ll find yourself brimming with self-confidence and more certainty than ever before as you look over your clean desk, see the smile on your boss’s face and cash that growing paycheck – not only that, you’ll have time on your hands to do the things that will give you real fulfillment and satisfaction in your life!
Write that book. Start that business. Go on that trip.
And right now you can have it all – every single level, all the brand new Innercises, skill training videos, workbooks and bonus trainings.
Not for the thousands it’s worth to you in saved time and money, not for $1997, or even $997… nowhere even close.
That’s right. Just a single, simple payment of less than $200 and you get it all. Six levels of powerful brain training audios and video training, plus additional cheat sheets and the bonus courses and trainings that you unlock along the way.
So, here we are. You have a choice to make.
OR
But what are you REALLY getting from this program? You’re gaining the ability to…
That’s the cost of procrastination!