According to the latest research, procrastination can do you good. It boosts your creativity and helps you to decide if what you’re doing is valuable to you or if it’s a waste of your precious time. But generally, procrastination has a negative connotation, because postponing and avoiding to complete tasks is not something to be proud of.
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Let’s see how you can handle this job like a pro and dodge procrastination.
Whether it’s about organizing your closet or cleaning up the mess from your garage, sending an email or reading some extra-curricular stuff for work, you name it.
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We tend to procrastinate. It’s in our nature.
It’s hard to mobilize and actually do what we set out to do, especially after a day at the office or countless more fun activities at hand: like watching the new episode of ‘Vikings’, playing games on your phone, making some calls or simply browsing your newsfeed.
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There’s a way to grease the wheels of productivity. And to say NO to procrastination: the five-minute rule.
The trickiest part is to get started. We all know that. That is why this technique is the best: it gets you going while allowing yourself to choose if you want to continue or not. In other words, give that heavy-handed assignment 5 minutes of your time. You will be even more surprised to find yourself engaged in the activity you dreaded so much.
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Rather than being forced into doing something, allocating only 5 minutes to the task gives you control over it, which then makes you feel more positive about it. Plus, you allow yourself to reconsider the activity after the minutes have passed. Usually, once we are started, we get an unexpected positive vibe towards what we’re doing.
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The CEO of Instagram, the 33-year-old Kevin Systrom, applies this tactic to avoid procrastination. “If you don’t want to do something, make a deal with yourself to do at least five minutes of it. After five minutes, you’ll end up doing the whole thing,” he recently told Axios.
Take this advice to avoid procrastination for good, pass it on!
