I would love to be able to go the gym more frequently. I know it’s good for my health and I am certain I will be grateful for it in the future. But when the moment arrives and I need to go for a workout, I just can’t bring myself to do.
Even when I wake up an hour early, hoping to make it to the treadmill for a morning session, the bed becomes far too comfortable to leave. Surely my future self won’t mind me taking a single day off, right?
But the longer I stay in bed for, the more I rationalise putting off my workout to another day. Doing this on a daily basis means that by the end of the week I have not been to the gym at all!
This pattern of events is not uncommon in other areas of our lives. University coursework, revision for exams, job applications, losing weight, saving money for an adventurous holiday – all these things are prone to an evolutionary quirk we all have. And that is to have a preference for immediate comfort despite the consequence of being worse off for it in the future.
But there’s a trick to beating procrastination of this kind. It isn’t particularly ground breaking stuff but it works all the time. Here it is…
When faced with a task you know you should be getting on with but you just don’t feel like it, do it immediately. Don’t give yourself time to overthink things so as to decide whether now is a good time or not. Waiting for motivation is a fool’s errand. Often times you only ‘feel like it’ after you get on with it. The trick, therefore, is to never allow your brain the chance to come up with excuses which, by the way, it’s extremely good at!
Michael Tefula
Author of Student Procrastination: Seize the Day and Get More Work Done