Anti-procrastination tips: how to boost your income

Procrastination is one of the worst enemies an entrepreneur can face. This art of putting off until tomorrow what could be done today quickly becomes a serious handicap that curbs a company’s revenue, when its leader seems frozen by their own inertia. This same affliction also hits people who want to go self-employed but struggle to turn their dreams into reality. Here are the best anti-procrastination tips to break out of paralysis and finally take action.

What is procrastination?

Procrastinating is the tendency to put off until tomorrow what you should do today, out of laziness, negligence, lack of interest, fear of failure, fear of not being up to the task… Procrastination locks you into an inertia that prevents you from carrying your projects through.

Procrastination creates a dangerous comfort zone

Procrastination lets you find every good excuse not to get started and not to act on ideas that could actually change your life. It creates a certain comfort, because you avoid confronting real difficulties and therefore avoid the risk of failure. It’s about finding every pretext to explain why you can’t move forward.

But it ends up making you feel guilty and creates a vicious circle

However, while you may save face socially by inventing excuses to justify this inertia, you sink into gloom because you’re unable to live your dreams. And if one day you stop fooling yourself, you lose respect in your own eyes, which only worsens your tendency to procrastinate.

The picture may look bleak, but it’s not hopeless! The moment you become aware that you’re procrastinating, you’ve already taken a giant step. The next step is to take the bull by the horns and apply the anti-procrastination tips below. By managing to beat this nasty habit, you regain confidence in yourself, and this newfound self-esteem lets you move forward. That’s when you create a virtuous circle. From that point on, your performance improves, and so does your revenue.

1. Create a comfortable working environment… but not too comfortable

It matters that you’re well set up at your workstation to find a certain comfort. That said, don’t overstep the mark by working from your bed, since the signals you send your brain are, to say the least, contradictory.

Be tidy and don’t live in a mess. The clutter in an office negatively affects your mind. Psychological drivers are particularly powerful: living in a clear, pleasant space unconsciously gives you more motivation.

2. Put your ideas and projects down in black and white

When you want to launch out as a self-employed professional, you’re often the sole originator of the project. If you lack motivation and fear failure, you have no one to motivate you and push you to act, rather than dreamily imagining what your business “could” be.

You need to make your ideas and projects concrete by defining them in words and images. Depending on how you best express yourself, sit down at your computer or in front of a blank page and start working on your project. Come back to these sentences and sketches describing your future business, your company’s org chart, a sales strategy, a logo, etc., as many times as needed.

Thanks to this concrete document, you’ll see more clearly where you want to go.

3. Set out the means to bring your project to fruition

Your project is starting to take shape, and you’re beginning to picture the means needed to bring it to fruition. Refine it and start drawing up the list of actions to take: conducting market research, looking for brand names, finding a partner or a supplier…

This list helps you define the means you’re giving yourself to succeed. If you can, include deadlines to keep yourself motivated. This helps you stay grounded in reality and forces you to take action.

Once you’ve completed the task on a line of your list, don’t delete it — check it off or cross it out instead. This lets you visualize the progress you’re making. While facing a long list can feel a bit daunting, as you check off lines you build value in your work and watch your goal get closer.

4. Question your fears

It’s not abnormal to have fears. It’s actually a rather good sign, since it proves you’re not oblivious to the risks. Still, you need to address your fears and not let them paralyze you.

Question your doubts so you can work through them. Rationalize your anxieties to calm them down. Over time, you’ll watch your project take shape and can reassure yourself about your abilities. As you feel more confident, you’ll be proud of having overcome your fears, which will boost your motivation.

And at worst…

You may not succeed at everything on the first try, but you’ll be building experience, which always benefits you. Keep the consequences in perspective if you don’t quickly reach your goals and have to persist. After all, it’s not a matter of life or death.

Becoming a business owner isn’t for everyone — it takes courage and ambition. Taking action means stepping out of your comfort zone, and you can be proud of that. See your project through, because there’s nothing worse in entrepreneurship than frustration. At the very least, you’ll be proud to look back on everything you’ve accomplished, and effort always pays off if you work seriously on your business.

5. Don’t wait for everything to be perfect — there’s no worse excuse for procrastination!

If perfection existed, we’d know about it! In the real world, we spend our time correcting, refining, improving… That’s also what makes entrepreneurship exciting. Setting yourself the goal of designing a perfect plan on paper before actually getting started is the perfect pretext for always pushing things off until tomorrow. In other words, you’re giving yourself every excuse to procrastinate.

Of course you shouldn’t launch blindly, but you do need to set deadlines and be firm about sticking to them. Things may not go exactly as planned, but if you’ve made it this far, you have what it takes to bounce back and find solutions to whatever comes your way.

6. Give yourself a schedule

Just as you did when laying the first groundwork for your project, list the actions to carry out day by day. By the end of the day, you should have checked off every box. If that’s not the case, you need to impose a slightly stricter discipline on yourself. That can usually start by moving up your alarm clock!

Procrastination uses every trick in the book to make you push back deadlines: getting up late, doing a thousand pointless little things before focusing on your business, letting yourself get distracted by social media, turning on the TV… Without turning into a drill sergeant, you absolutely need to set yourself a framework that forces you to move forward.

Plan your breaks

You shouldn’t let yourself be interrupted at every moment by distractions like a blinking inbox or a ringing phone. You waste an enormous amount of time by splitting your tasks into fragments, since you lack focus.

That said, you’re of course entitled to breaks. Set yourself a fixed time or some kind of deadline — for example, the end of a given task — to get up, grab a coffee, play with the dog for two minutes…

7. Congratulate yourself on every step forward!

Congratulate yourself on every step forward, because no one else will do it for you! When you check off a line on your to-do list, or when you notice at the end of the day that you’ve stuck to your schedule, be proud of it.

Everything that feels rewarding strengthens your self-confidence.

Procrastination isn’t incurable — far from it. Once you manage to defeat it, you’ll be proud of having pushed past your limits, and your motivation will only grow stronger as you carry your project and your ambitions through to the end.