How to Actually Rewire Your Brain to Stop Procrastinating

Procrastination isn’t laziness, it’s the fear of failure. Ending the tendency to procrastinate requires a mindset shift that turns into a habit when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly. Challenging perfectionism, embracing a learning curve, and detaching your value from your performance is the key to getting started. After all, action precedes motivation — completing one task progressively builds the confidence to take on new and bigger goals without hesitation. 

Perfectionism often goes hand in hand with procrastination. It makes us fear the outcome before even starting, so we don’t start at all. We fear we have to be in a perfect state to get started, that we need better skills. The truth is there will never be a perfect time to start, nor will we ever be fully ready. 

The first step to halting our procrastination is to realize that perfection is a false idol. Perfectionism is not necessary for success. We forget about the learning curve every successful person went through to become an expert in their craft and the many challenges they overcame. Learning to be okay with being average before being good is the first step to achieving one’s goals.

Start now, start where you are. Perfectionism leaves you paralyzed, waiting for the perfect conditions. But you may be waiting for the rest of your life. The perfect time doesn’t exist and success does not require starting with perfection. Accepting the learning curve is the beginning of achievement. No self-made person starts off as an expert, but as a learner with a love for the process. It is only then that one can shed the fear of failure that stops us from starting at all.

Fight procrastination by detaching yourself from the outcome and just promising yourself to put in your best effort. Stop attaching your worth to the outcome. Just start.

Once we internalize this anti-perfectionist mentality we can implement proactive habits that help us take action such as tackling the biggest task first, keeping an agenda, analyzing our motives, setting artificial deadlines with timers, and using a “reward system.”

1. Choose long-term satisfaction over instant-gratification to take steps towards your goals. Your future self will thank you.
2. Detach yourself from the outcome and from perfectionism. Your worth isn’t in your achievements or external validation and successful people are the ones who persisted through a learning curve.
3. Make a to-do list of all your tasks and highlight the ones you actually need done for the day
4. Tackle the biggest task in the morning first.
5. Time yourself to create an artificial deadline — keeping a timer in 30 minute increments helps prevent you from wasting time surfing the internet or scrolling through your phone endlessly. We all know how much faster we seem to work under the pressure of a nearing deadline. One too many A+ grades on 11:59 PM college assignment submissions has taught me that — but I don’t recommend it.
6. Reward yourself with all the extra free time you have from not wasting it on anxiously procrastinating without ever really relaxing because you were too busy thinking about your looming tasks.
7. Remember that action precedes motivation — don’t overschedule tasks, just do one thing and your motivation will grow from there until you’ve suddenly finished.
8. Remind yourself of your motivations. “He who has a why…can bear almost any how.” You can bear two hours of work.

Action precedes motivation. And done is better than perfect. We often sit around waiting for ephemeral motivation when just taking the first step gets the ball rolling and fuels your motivation. Discipline will always win over waiting for “motivation” — it has the power to change your life. Think about how glad your future self will be that you took that first step.

Procrastination is an issue of fear, we fear failing, instead of detaching ourselves from the outcome, giving our best effort, and fervently seeking our goals despite our fear. I’ve been surprised time and time again by what life has to offer when I stop rejecting myself before opportunities and others do. 

Don’t let perfectionism keep you from starting. You can’t steer a parked car, and you can’t grow and reach your goals without persisting through a learning curve. Fear doing nothing more than failing.