What is the relationship between procrastination and mindset?
Procrastination is not as connected to mindset as people often think. Although apositive mindset can help beat procrastination, I would say that divorcing yourself from mindset reliance entirely leads to faster results. In other words, you don’t think too much about your mindset and instead build momentum with the thing you want to do as a daily habit.
There’s no real way to cure procrastination. You just have to get used to facing it until you’re desensitized and don’t make a big deal out of the task anymore.
Procrastination is mostly associated with laziness, but this is an incomplete understanding. Laziness is just an emotion, so it hardly correlates perfectly with a behavior pattern. It’s like suggesting that crying comes from sadness. That isn’t entirely true, since people can laugh until they cry, or cry from their eyes being irritated.
Then there’s the idea that procrastination comes from a fixed or scarcity-oriented mindset. This makes more sense than just pointing to a singular emotion like laziness. I can understand this reasoning being true in some people’s cases, but I’m not sure it explains that many.
Procrastination CAN come from a fixed mindset, but it’s also likely to come from fear or discomfort, which is what I consider a bi-polar emotion. By that, I mean it’s a feeling that can be interpreted in two completely opposite ways. You can be afraid in a fun, happy way, such as going down a roller coaster drop, or in a bad way, where you’re afraid you won’t be able to meet your deadlines and you’ll get fired. We can often procrastinate for one of these reasons, when if we really analyze the situation, we are feeling the opposite of what we claim to feel.
For instance, imagine you have been trying to make it as an artist and you get an invite from someone you know to attend an art show they’re running, giving you a table to display your work. You avoid committing, telling yourself that you’re ready to do it, you just want everything to be ready and to have the right kind of pieces completed. But in reality, you’ll never get the pieces you claim to need done finished in time. If you analyze your feelings, you might really be just telling yourself you want everything to be perfect, and in reality you’re afraid of going and then no one caring about your work, embarrassing you and draining your motivation.
There are many things in life which we ought to do, and even want to, but don’t. The sooner you learn to detect and uproot that problem in anything you care about, the sooner you start making real progress toward your goals.
Now I have to emphasize: human beings and human lives are NOT meant to be hacked into maximum productivity. It’s not bad to lay around and relax sometimes, it’s not bad sleep in if nobody is waiting on you, it’s not bad to take breaks or vacations. And it’s definitely not wrong to want to work much less time than you don’t work every week. But, you also should have enough of a grip and sense of focus that you keep putting in the work it takes to get there, and make clear progress every day.
Let’s complete this answer with a few quick tips to have a positive mindset and keep procrastination at bay, because it does help to stay upbeat:
#1 Plan/organize your routine tasks.
#2 Avoid distractions, don’t multitask.
#3 Improve in multiple areas of your life at once..
#4 Be fearless.
#5 Be social. Create accountability by telling others about your goals.
Before finishing up, I have an interesting post that can give more points to this answer. My post: “How to Never Wimp Out Again” gets into more detail on beating procrastination spells. If you are interested, you can read that on my website.
Please feel free to reply if you need any clarification.
Good Luck!
Thanks,
Cleo