What causes procrastination?

The procrastination, this pathological tendency to postpone, to put action to the next, is one of the greatest enemies of productivity.

If nobody had procrastinated since the beginning of the history of humanity, I dare not even imagine all that would have been accomplished and where the world would be!

So what’s the reasons for procrastination?

Individually, we would probably have completed several projects that we ended up abandoning, spent a lot less sleepless nights at university, not to mention the level of productivity that we could have achieved at work.

But hey, as we say, with "if" we could remake the world! We cannot change the past, but we can learn from it for the future.

We usually have our first experiences with procrastination as soon as we have a little freedom on our schedule. I don't know about you, but for me, it was in high school when I realized that it was much more interesting to spend my evenings and weekends photographing everything with my new 2.1-megapixel digital camera (which I've named Georgette) rather than studying. At that time, we don't realize that there is a word to describe this phenomenon, even less than it will haunt us all our lives!

This craze does not improve on its own over time. Once you have taken these bad folds, they become frankly stubborn and it is very difficult to get rid of them.

The problem is that by always putting off our tasks and doing most of our work at the last minute, we end up not doing half of what we could potentially do, and what that we manage to do is not of a quality that does justice to our talents.

Let's do a little visualization exercise. See yourself in the not too distant future, say in two to five years. What projects would you like to have completed by then? Now imagine all that you could accomplish and the possibilities of professional advancement that it would open to you if you could realize your projects without never procrastinating!

Stopping procrastinating is difficult, but achievable. The first step to achieving this is to understand why we procrastinate, what is the cause of this irresistible behavior which makes such a tenacious mania.

Even if procrastination, at its source, manifests itself for different reasons, the cause is always the same: resistance.

Resistance is always the cause of procrastination, no matter the reasons behind it.

But what is resistance, more precisely? Well, it's about the force in us that seeks at all costs to distract us, to convince us that we are too tired to do this, that we cannot start to do our tasks without having first done that, or that it is impossible to work in this or that condition.

"Procrastination is the most common manifestation of resistance because it is the easiest to rationalize." In other words, it's the little voice in our head that gives us a thousand and one excuses, which often seem very legitimate, for not advancing our work.

Resistance stands firm between the life we live and the one we know we could and we would like to live. Why is it that we never manage to stick to our New Year's resolutions for so long? It is usually the procrastination caused by our resistance that prevented us to take the first step.

It is completely tragic because it prevents us from
reaching our full potential! "Are you a writer who doesn't write? An artist who does not paint, an entrepreneur who never starts his business? "

Every day, we lose little fights against the resistance, without even understanding what happened. We start the day with enough ambition to move a mountain and a completely realistic goal in mind, but we end it by asking where did the last 8 hours go and how is it possible to have accomplished so little during this time. This is because "the hardest part is not working, it is sitting down and working."

In short, resistance is an enemy to be confronted daily if we want to stop the procrastination of our life.