Good planning is fundamental to overcoming procrastination. A good plan lets you know exactly what your next task is and how, when and why you need to do it. This reduces the gap between wanting to act and starting to act, where procrastination thrives. It also helps to reduce stress, anxiety and overwhelm. A plan that accounts for the common causes of your procrastination can prevent the desire to procrastinate from ever arising. The following is a list of strategies to help craft a great plan.
The list of possible goals is endless. Most of us have multiple goals that we would like to achieve one day. Most of us have also spent long hours working towards a goal that we thought was vital but gave us no satisfaction once achieved. By finding the right goal, we can avoid spending time, resources and energy working towards impossible or ultimately unsatisfying goals. If you take time to prepare a goal tied to your core values, you will be more likely to succeed at the goal and obtain benefits and satisfaction from working towards it.
It is helpful to examine our motives before planning our goals. Understanding why we want to achieve a goal can help us find the easiest and best ways to get what we truly want. You can do this by taking the following steps:
Many of us have goals that sit around in the back of our minds that we never take action on. This is natural but can sometimes lead to feelings of regret or lack of fulfillment. Sometimes we don’t act on our goals simply because we don’t know where to start. By properly researching our goals, we can identify what is required to succeed and whether we should begin working towards them or put them off for now.
Research your goal thoroughly before beginning:
A common misstep in planning is focusing more on the reward at the end than the work needed to get there. Many people dream of writing a novel, but most imagine the success of having written a novel. Few dream about the long hours sitting alone in a room painstakingly constructing sentences. Consider the actual work involved in your goal. Is doing that work how you want to spend your time? If the work is painful or difficult, you will be far less likely to succeed. If you can find a goal where the work involved is enjoyable, or you can craft the work into something more pleasant, then your chances of success increase significantly.
Once you understand what the goal requires, ask yourself: do I have the time, resources, motivation and ability to succeed? When answering this question, consider how pursuing this goal will affect your life, the people around you and any other goals you have. If the answer is anything but an unwavering yes, consider adjusting the goal or choosing another one. If the answer is yes, then you’re on the right track.
Clear and specific goals allow us to monitor our progress, reward ourselves at milestones and measure success. A general goal like: ‘to get fit’ could mean many things. As we work towards an unclear goal we can encounter mission creep, where our progress towards a goal changes our idea of success. If you hadn’t run in years, the goal ‘to get fit’ might mean being able to run five miles. But once you can run 5 miles, if you are regularly overtaken by strangers while out running, your idea of what ‘to get fit’ means can change. You might want to run 5 miles at a particular speed or to run 10 miles. With an ill-defined goal, this can occur again and again to the point that we become disheartened with never achieving the goal and give up. On the other hand, achieving fixed goals builds confidence and motivates us in our next goal. So it is often better to finish one specific goal before moving on to the next one than to strive endlessly for a vague aim.
Some of the most desirable goals are naturally broad. A comprehensive view of the goal ‘to get fit’ goes beyond physical stamina into ideas like freedom from illness, low blood pressure, or strength. When aiming to achieve a broad goal, it can help to break it down into specific sub-goals. The goal to ‘get fit’ could be broken down into the following sub-goals:
One element of clearly defining a goal is to determine when the goal must be completed. Deadlines provide a sense of urgency, which motivates action. Where a deadline is distant, it can help to fix deadlines on milestones at regular intervals to ensure you don’t procrastinate early on.
Measurable goals allow us to monitor our progress, know when we have succeeded and attach rewards to specific intervals to encourage ourselves along the way.
Most goals start out as a general aim, like: ‘learn to play the guitar.’ But learning the guitar can mean many things. Are you learning acoustic or electric? Classical or modern? Blues or flamenco? The more you learn about the guitar, the more you find new things to learn. You might never be content with your skill at the guitar. It can help to identify specific, measurable goals to hook your idea of success on so that you know when you have achieved your goals. Aim for goals that are as objective as possible, for example:
When it comes to goal setting, humans can be hopelessly optimistic. We often set goals during moments of inspiration without accounting for the fact that inspiration is fleeting and will be gone before long. Any goal that requires us to operate at maximum effort or efficiency over any significant length of time is doomed. Few people can sprint at their peak speed for more than ten seconds. The same is true for the mental energy required to achieve goals. There will always be days when motivation is low or life gets in the way. Even if you were super-human, it is inevitable that at some point during a complex goal, something unanticipated will happen that will require time and effort to correct. We can account for this by building more time into our plan than we think we will need so we have a buffer when the unexpected occurs. A good guide is to decide how long you think the goal will take, decide on a buffer period that feels right, then double that buffer period and add it to your goal schedule.
When setting a goal, consider how it will affect your other goals and your personal life. Goals that require significant personal sacrifice are grueling. Setting goals that don’t allow leisure time or time with family and friends is unrealistic. All-consuming goals can work in the short term but won’t be sustainable long-term and will result in burnout. Keep these things in mind when planning your goal.
Working on tasks with distant goals can feel abstract and non-urgent. That is part of why procrastinating is so common for students writing essays due months away. Multiple modest short-term goals are often more achievable than a single ambitious long-term one. Once you achieve a short-term goal, you can start another goal that builds off the success of the earlier one. Achieving a goal builds confidence and motivation. This way, you can develop success spirals that accelerate you from goal to goal and make achieving complex and ambitious goals easier. It is often better to start small and build a series of cascading goals than to set one massive goal, no matter how tempting that may be in the swell of motivation that often inspires goal setting.