Why do today, what you can put off until tomorrow? Here I present the 5 tips for procrastination.
Or as someone else expanded further “Why do tomorrow, what you can put off a month from now?” In this article I’m going to talk about procrastination. Before you get excited I need to state up front this is not how to overcome procrastination, but rather how to procrastinate.
Procrastination has a long and proud history dating all the way back to the ancient Egyptians. From the 11th dynasty of ancient Egypt pyramid construction techniques changed. Instead of the large grandiose pyramids from before, these were little more than mountains of mud brick encased in a veneer of polished limestone, and even later pyramids were built on top of hills. This basically tells us that the work was so hard, they started to procrastinate eventually resulting in smaller and less well constructed pyramids.
It’s sort of like my Algebra homework in high-school. First I started waiting until the end of the night to work on my homework, then the next morning before school, then just before class, and then during class, and finally I stopped doing homework altogether. For some reason I got moved into a more remedial geometry class called “Practical Geometry”, but that’s a story for another day.
There were several famous people who procrastinated getting their high-school diplomas, which among them are, Dave Thomas, Founder of Wendy’s; Comedian and Actor Bill Cosby; Famed female race-car driver Danica Patrick; Olympic gymnast, Mary Lou Retton; Actor Christian Slater; Musician Waylon Jennings, and many more. Technically, though, they got their GED’s rather than specifically putting off getting their high-school diplomas. Many of them did however put off getting their GED’s and they seemed to turn out fine.
So now that you know a little bit about this history of procrastination, here I present 5 tips to help you procrastinate if you find you’re getting “too much” done.
1.) Find something really large and overwhelming, the bigger the project the better. The idea is to make it so large and unwieldy in your mind that you want to put off the pain of working on it as much as possible.
2.) Never break down said large project into manageable steps. Steps have a nasty habit of getting done. You want to put this off as long as possible, so don’t break it down. In fact maybe you could make this large and unwieldy project a smaller step of a much larger, even more unwieldy, project. Did you notice how much I love the word unwieldy?
3.) Find other things you’d love to do first. Maybe watch a movie. Play some video games. Do some drawing. Maybe even do some sleeping. Sleeping is really good because you’ll be procrastinating without really realizing it. What? It’s 2 PM already?
4.) Don’t set goals. Goals eventually turn into steps and remember what I said about never breaking a large project into steps. Well actually there’s an exception to this tip, and that’s spending all your available time writing goals. Writing and rewriting, it’s a good way to put off actually working on your project.
5.) Two words: busy work. Why not do some work that will take a lot of time but not really making any kind of progress. This goes along with tip number 4 because setting goals and constantly refining them can be a good source of busy work. Write down what you’re going to do but never actually do it. This can also be considered an exception to tip number 2. Breaking stuff down can be a good source of busy-work, however, you may be in danger of actually breaking it down far enough into manageable steps.
If you just stick to these 5 tips you’ll be on your way to doing nothing in no time!
Until ‘Monday’