6 Tools to Help You Beat Procrastination and Act Immediately
- The Orange Stack
- Oct 30, 2018
- 3 min read
Have you heard of the law of diminishing intent? If not, it’s a principle in psychology that explains why people who do not act immediately become less likely to act as time passes. For instance, you may get a brilliant idea on how to reach your customers. But it will take effort, time and money. If you have all three, but you put off implementing the idea, by tomorrow, your enthusiasm will have waned. By next week, you’ll barely remember the excitement, and by next month you will have convinced yourself that it was a silly idea to begin with and be thankful that you did not waste your time, money and effort on it. What you will have done is succumbed to the law of diminishing intent. To beat this, you need to fight procrastination and build a habit of acting fast. The six tools below will help you achieve this.
1. Learn to put things down on paper
Let’s say you are faced with a challenge. You try to think it through, but you get stuck. Most people will simply file it away in their minds for later. This is the wrong way to do it. When you do this, you tell your brain to stop looking for a solution and to focus on other things. Instead, you need to form a habit of writing things down. Write the problem down and articulate it as best you can. Then, revisit it periodically in the course of the day. Write possible solutions as they come to you. You will find that doing this makes it easy to revisit the issue without having to go through all the emotions involved with the initial occurrence of that problem.
2. Practice brainstorming
Brainstorming is a popular, yet poorly understood term. If you’ve ever had a brainstorming session, you’ll know that most ideas your brain produces tend to be rational and mostly safe. True brainstorming, on the other hand, is all about letting your mind go. It’s telling your brain to think whatever it wants for the duration of the brainstorming session. What this does is it removes the barriers that come with thinking logically and systematically. Brainstorming opens the door for the next point, eccentric ideas.
3. Come up with eccentric ideas
How do you drive more sales? A logical idea is you need to make more sales calls. An eccentric idea would be you need to make fewer sales calls. While the idea may sound illogical, it creates a new perspective for your brain to think of alternative solutions for the problem you are facing. When done in a group, these “moonshot” ideas may sound whacky, but they are often the path to finding the real solution to the problem. If you can train your mind to go off the beaten path, you will find spectacular ideas that you would never have conceived had you stuck to the old path.
4. Free your mind by doodling
Sounds silly but this is an extremely effective way to free up your mind. Let me explain. Let’s say you are trying to figure out how to close a client. You’ve tried everything, but nothing seems to be working. What’s happening is that your brain has gotten stuck in a loop. It keeps thinking of the same solutions over and over. When you sit down to doodle, your brain stops focusing on that loop and goes into neutral gear. This frees it to start accessing other sets of information in your brain, something important in the quest to find a solution.
5. Tap into information highways
Often, people fail to act because they feel they lack enough information to support their decision to act. This information deficit, while important and crucial to acting, is hardly impossible to surmount. What causes most to falter is that they do not take the immediate step to seek out more information. Instead, they simply accept that they lack enough information and they leave it at that. To beat this trap, form the habit of actively seeking out information to support your decision to act immediately.
6. Never stop learning
Learning is the path to everything. Through learning, you earn more money, accumulate more knowledge, achieve greater wisdom, and live a fuller life. By developing a habit of continuous learning, you will learn the greatest lesson of all; that when you act, whether you fail or succeed, you will have learned something new. That should be enough reason to motivate you always to act quickly.
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