We continue to explore 3 more reasons why we procrastinate in this second part, you can click here to read part 1:
4. Complacency
‘There’s no rush’, ‘I’ll wait till the kids have left home’, ‘I’ll quit smoking in the New Year’. There always seems to be some reason why we can put off taking action today. What can drive this attitude is a false belief that there is plenty of time to accomplish all we want to achieve. But when tomorrow does come, we find another excuse to avoid taking action.
Points to ponder: Complacency can also occur due to the mistaken belief that life is something that happens to you as opposed to something you can influence.
A lack of goals and sense of purpose in our lives, results in people drifting along in a haze of complacency.
Returning to our foundation formula to the SUMO principles E + R = O; well if life is the Event and complacency is your Response how satisfied are you likely to be with the Outcome?
Wake up and smell the coffee. Life at its longest is still fairly short. Shut Up the voice of complacency and Move On to what’s important.
In what areas of your life have you allowed complacency to creep in? Your career? Relationships? Home improvements? Finance? Fitness? All of them?
5. Action Illusion
Some people can always appear busy. The question is, busy doing what? Rather than admit that they don’t want to do a task, they use a lack of time as their excuse. People can talk about what they are going to do, hold meetings to discuss how they are going to do it and even draw up plans outlining what they will do. This may all be very useful initially, but there comes a time when we need to start taking action.
When all is said and done, more is said than done.
We saw from our first SUMO principle that on a day to-day basis, we do so much on auto-pilot, i.e. without thinking. Maybe we need to ask ourselves, ‘Am I confusing activity with effectiveness?’
6. Fuzzy Focus
This occurs when we’ve got so many things competing for our attention that we’re not sure what to focus on. There’s so much you could do but without prioritizing your goals you become unfocused and this lack of clarity can cause indecision and inactivity.
Are your activities and your busyness hiding the fact that you do not want to address the really important issues in your life right now?
So we have explored why people procrastinate; now we need to examine how to overcome it.
