Moving from Procrastination to Proactivation

Here are some ideas to help make you a victor over change rather than a victim of change:

1. Set your wake-up time a half hour earlier tomorrow and keep the clock at that setting. Use the extra time to think about the best way to spend your day.
2. Memorize and repeat this motto: “Action TNT: Today, not Tomorrow.” Handle each piece of incoming mail only once. Answer your e-mail either early in the morning or after working hours. Block out specific times to initiate phone calls, take incoming calls, and to meet people in person.
3. When people tell you their problems, give solution-oriented feedback. Rather than taking on the problem as your own assignment, first, ask what’s the next step they plan to take, or what they would like to see happen.
4. Finish what you start. Concentrate all your energy and intensity, without distraction, on successfully completing your current major project.
5. Be constructively helpful instead of unhelpfully critical. Single out someone or something to praise instead of participating in group griping, grudge collecting or pity parties.
6. Limit your television viewing or Internet surfing to mostly educational or otherwise enlightening programs. Watch no more than one hour of television per day or night, unless there is a special program you have been anticipating. The Internet has also become a great procrastinator’s hideout for tension-relieving instead of goal-achieving activities.
7. Make a list of five necessary but unpleasant projects you’ve been putting off, with a completion date for each project. Immediate action on unpleasant projects reduces stress and tension. It is very difficult to be active and depressed at the same time.
8. Seek out and converse with a successful role model and mentor. Learning from others’ successes and setbacks will inevitably improve production of any kind. Truly listen; really find out how your role models do it right.
9. Understand that fear, as an acronym, is False Evidence Appearing Real, and that luck could mean Laboring Under Correct Knowledge. The more information you have on any subject—especially case histories—the less likely you’ll be to put off your decisions.
10. Accept problems as inevitable offshoots of change and progress. With the ever more rapid pace of change in society and business, you’ll be overwhelmed unless you view change as normal and learn to look for its positive aspects—such as new opportunities and improvements—rather than bemoan the negative.

There is actually no such thing as a “future” decision; there are only present decisions that will affect the future. Procrastinators wait for just the right moment to decide.

If you wait for the perfect moment, you become a security-seeker who is running in place, unwittingly digging yourself deeper into your rut. If you wait for every objection to be overcome, you’ll attempt nothing. Get out of your comfort zone and go from procrastinating to proactivating. Make your personal motto: “Stop stewing and start doing!”

-- Denis Waitley