Motivation Served Daily Blog

Here are 3 extremely powerful techniques to beat procrastination used by most successful people.

1. The first technique is called the Ten Minute Rule:

I’m sure you know that if a task involves too much hardwork, it stands a very good chance of getting postponed. But the bottom line is to become successful you will have to do the work, there’s no way around it.

However what you can do is make your goals seem much easier and doable. Break big jobs down into small manageable tasks, something that would only take five or ten minutes to complete. Let’s say that your goal is to get fit and have a gorgeous looking body…

To do that, you’ve decided to start exercising everyday for half an hour – OOO MY GOD, half an hour for tiresome exercises? What were you thinking?

But let’s say instead that you do a quick ten-minute warmup, just for fun, nothing extra hard. Sounds a lot more appealing doesn’t it?

2. The second technique is called Three Magical Questions:

The next time you catch yourself putting off an important task, take a piece of paper and answer three important questions:

Where are you?

What do you want to do?

How will you feel after doing it?

Let’s say it’s Thursday at 3:45pm, you’re in your office surfing the internet and pretending to work. You know you should be working on your project but you just can’t make yourself start – sound familiar?

Here’s a perfect excuse for distracting yourself from not doing anything – Take a piece of paper and begin answering the questions:

Where are you?

- I’m sitting in my office browsing the internet.

What do you want to do?

- I want to finish my project today by 5pm.

How will you feel after doing it?

- I will feel proud of myself and satisfied that I’ve gotten it done today. Tomorrow I’ll have plenty of time to do other things and so on…

While writing down what it is you want to do, you will already imagine yourself doing it, and it won’t be very difficult to get up and do it. It’s a very simple technique but it works like MAGIC!

3. The third technique is my favorite – it’s called Ultimate Goal vs. Immediate Desire:

Very often our ultimate goal may come into conflict with something we want to do right now. Let’s call it an immediate desire. I’m sure you know this feeling. For example your goal is to quit smoking but your immediate urge is to light up a cigarette right this second.

The chances you’ll be inclined to fulfill your immediate desire at the expense of your ultimate dream are pretty high. Of course you can always overcome this cravings to smoke, through iron-willed self discipline but that’s the hardest work on earth.

Why torture yourself when there’s a much easier way to resist the temptation? All you have to do is make your ultimate goal and your immediate desire change places.

Turn having a cigarette into something you can put off and then turn your smoke free life, into something you insist on right this second.

Ask yourself one question, at this instant, would I prefer good health? Strong white teeth? Better looking skin? Or a cigarette?

If you choose the cigarette, you never wanted to quit smoking in the first place. But if you care about your lungs, your health, and don’t want to continue to feel short of breath, then you should start putting off smoking right away.

These 3 extremely powerful techniques when applied judiciously will enable anyone to beat procrastination for good.

Thanks for reading!