How to Stop Procrastination to Ensure Career Success

There are many activities and tasks that need to be completed in order to make a change in your professional life such as updating a CV, preparing for interviews and job searching.  So regardless of whether you are looking to get a promotion, a new job, change career direction entirely or start a business, don’t let procrastination be the reason for not achieving your career goal. 

“Procrastination is the bad habit of putting off until the day after tomorrow what should have been done the day before yesterday.”  We can all relate to procrastinating at some stage in our lives, where we misuse our time instead of doing something more meaningful and productive.  Procrastination is the action of delaying or postponing something and there are many reasons why we procrastinate. In this article, I want to share some simple tips on how to stop procrastination so you can create the professional life that you always wanted.  

Tips to Stop Procrastination to Ensure Career Success   

Professional Vision

The first step to overcoming Procrastination, is to identify your professional vision and goals. Once you have identified your professional vision and the goals that you would like to achieve, spend some time understanding the reasons WHY you want to achieve these.

 Some questions to reflect upon:

• What exactly do you want to achieve in your professional life?
• What is the purpose or benefit of achieving this?
• Make a list of the reasons why you want to achieve your professional goals.

Always keep the end goal in mind and remember WHY you are doing this. A good idea might be to print off the list with the reasons why and have it somewhere visible on a daily basis.

Make a Smart To-Do List 

The next step is to create a list of tasks that you need to do to achieve your professional goals. If you are looking for a new job, some tasks might include: updating your CV and applying for jobs.  Once you have created the list of tasks, then put the long-term goal at the top of the page (for inspiration), followed by the smaller tasks that you need to complete to achieve that goal.  

Here are some pointers to consider:

• Prioritise your list of tasks and identify what tasks needs to be completed first. Make a list of these tasks in order of priority.
• Be realistic with your timelines, some of these tasks might take weeks and even months to complete. Put dates and specific deadlines besides each of these tasks to create urgency and to ensure these tasks gets completed.
• Break these tasks into little manageable steps and identify what task can you start today and this week?

Eliminate Distractions 

Procrastination is made very easy with the constant distractions that we are living with such as email notifications and mobile apps.  In order to ensure your career success you need to help yourself on a daily basis to eliminate distractions and to avoid getting distracted so easily. 

Here are some simple daily activities that might help you:

• Try the Pomodoro Technique: Set a timer for 25minutes, and work until the timer goes off. Take a 5-minute break, and repeat.
• Avoid multi-tasking. Focus on one task and once that task is completed move on to the next task.
• Put your mobile phone away and turn off email and other notifications on your computer until the end of the day.
• Make tedious tasks more enjoyable. Do something small that you like while completing your to-do list, like listening to your favourite music.

Stop overcomplicating things 

Start working towards your professional goals today and stop overcomplicating things. You have identified the list of tasks that you need to complete in order to achieve your professional goal, so get working on these tasks.  Do the best you can and take action now. Don’t fall into the perfectionism trap by thinking that maybe now is not the best time because of X, Y, Z reasons.   Ditch these thoughts because there’s never a perfect time.  If you keep waiting for one, you are never going to accomplish your career goals. 

Celebrate your Successes   

Finally, celebrate the small successes that you make along the way.  You can do this on a weekly or even a daily basis.  Start training your mind to acknowledge everything that you have completed instead of focusing on everything that needs to be done.  By doing this you will enjoy the journey of achieving your professional goals a lot more.  

I hope you enjoyed reading this article and that you have gained some tips on how to stop procrastinating to ensure career success. Please share this article with anyone who might benefit from it.