Presentations, Seminars, and Workshops

Turning Procrastination Around

A 1-2 hour workshop

Procrastination is not simply putting a task off to the future. When we procrastinate we not only waste clock time, we actually intensify our sense of time flowing, and add to the illusion that fulfillment lies in the future.

In this workshop we will discuss common ways of dealing with procrastination, analyze what it really means to put something off to the future, identify the negative feelings that distract us from completing projects, and do an isometric exercise to relieve our conflict.

Finally, we will do a presumé exercise, an antidote and preventative for procrastination. In the presumé we'll assume it's some future date, and look back from that future date to see what was learned and accomplished on projects we were putting off. Besides cutting through resistance to getting things done, the presumé can evoke creative insight about how tasks can efficiently be accomplished, and foster a deep sense of confidence in knowing that we can complete our projects.

 

Possible benefits of the workshop:

You will:

 

Highlights and Key Points:

Procrastination is putting off doing something that you want to do now. If you don't really want to do it now, you are simply postponing it, or rescheduling it, not procrastinating.

To handle procrastination, first make sure you've broken the project into pieces that are manageable. If you don't have bite-sized tasks, you'll probably be confused and perhaps overwhelmed.

Procrastination is a particular way of struggling with time. Procrastinating is like swimming to the bank of the river of time and getting up on the shore to keep from being swept away by the current; but eventually we find that by not being involved, we are dissatisfied.

Some people procrastinate about work, and others about taking breaks, or taking care of themselves.

Procrastination begins with some kind of negative feeling that distracts us from what we're doing.

Most of us know how we waste time and miss opportunities, how we have to set up things twice, and perhaps how we erode our self-confidence. But there are other, less commonly known side-effects. Procrastination is a really good example of how we create or intensify our sense of time, so that it can feel as though time is speeding up or slowing down. A second side-effect is that procrastination depreciates experience, depletes our enjoyment of and fulfillment with whatever we're doing, because it creates or strengthens the separation of present from future in our experience.

Procrastination is the repression or suppression of an unpleasant feeling that results in temporally separating oneself from a task.

We can take the characteristic orientation of procrastination, where we're avoiding looking from the present toward the project lurking in the future, and reverse it--look from the future back towards the present, loosening the energy locked up by procrastination.

Procrastination begins with some kind of negative feeling that distracts us. However, 'negative' is often just a label put on top of neutral energy. If the 'negative' label can be seen through, there's no impetus to avoid things.

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