Old Habits Are Hard To Break

Overcoming procrastination can be difficult.

We feel good for a few days, but then old habits return or we get frustrated with our seeming lack of progress. Nothing happens fast enough. If you experience a small setback at this stage, it may be enough to stop you from pursuing what you wanted to achieve.

Fortunately, there are things you can do to improve your chances of success.

Aka Accountability!

Track your progress

Start tracking what you do. You can do this with a simple custom tracker. Use a box for each day of the week and cross it off or fill it in as you do what you promised yourself to do. Keep tracking until it becomes a habit or until the project is finished. For larger projects that you may not work on every day, it's a good idea to write down your goals and then break them down into milestones. Grab this free goal tracker to help you get started! Record your progress and how much closer you are to each of your goals.

Make daily to-do lists

Write a list of everything you want to do during the day. I find it helpful to do this the day before. Try to see how many items you have added to the list. You don't want it to overwhelm you, but you want to challenge yourself to do more. A list keeps you accountable because you can see in black and white whether you are late or not.

Tell someone about your plans

If you've been struggling to do something, tell someone else about your plans so that it finally comes to fruition. Call a friend, tell your spouse or share it on social media. Encourage the people you hang out with to check how you did. It might be the little extra effort you need to stop procrastinating.

Find an accountability buddy

Last but not least, find someone else to defer to and hold each other accountable. It can be as simple as logging in once in the morning and stating what you each want to do, then again at the end of the day to see what happened. Knowing that someone else is with you can be very motivating.

Try each of these procrastination strategies and see which ones give you the best results. Like anything else, procrastination is a habit and you can break it and transform yourself into the motivated and productive version you want to be.

Are you in the community? We have been discussing procrastination all week and handing out gifts to help you stay on task and ignited in your goals! Join us if you want to jump in and meet others who may also be struggling with procrastination! Who knows, you might find and accountability partner! Talk soon!

Shay aka A. Calamity