How to Battle Your Procrastination

A Making Life Commentary:
How to Conquer Procrastination Effectively and Efficiently

By Robert N. Taylor

Procrastination can ruin your life. Constantly delaying the completion of tasks which should be done can lead to stress, missed opportunities, disappointments and a reputation as a failure. Indeed, you could actually become a failure.

With the above as real possibilities, the question rings out loudly: What is the most effective way of conquering procrastination in the shortest period of time possible? My research into issues of personal and social betterment led to the following conclusion.

It is critically important that you know why you are procrastinating in starting or completing a particular task or project. It is only once you know the specific cause of your particular procrastination that you can honestly begin the process of solving the problem. And you solve the problem not by attacking the problem but by attacking the cause of the problem with the opposite of the cause.

Keep that thought in mind. You solve a problem by identifying its cause and then attacking the cause with its opposite.

In the case of procrastination, there are only four causes for a person unnecessarily delaying the completion of a task or project;

#1 - Overburdened - You feel overburdened with other responsibilities and cannot find the time to start the task. Solution: Drop or delay the responsibilities which bring you the least benefit and create the time you need. Again, find the cause and attack with the opposite.

#2 - Fear - You fear starting the project because you think it will bring some type of physical or emotional pain or discomfort. Solution: Break the project into comfortable (or least painful) parts and tackle it one segment at a time. Do a little on a consistent basis and the task will be completed.

#3 - Resentment - You resent doing the task because you feel it has been forced upon you or should be done by someone else. Solution: Be man or woman enough to let your resentment be known and actually see if you can get the more appropriate person do the task. If this approach does not work, you have no choice but to adopt the strategy specified in #2 above.

#4 - Overwhelmed - You feel overwhelmed by the project because you are not sure how to go about doing it. Solution: Gain knowledge. There is virtually nothing you can confront which has not been confronted by someone else. They have either written about it or they are willing to talk about how they overcame.

Finally, remember that we only procrastinate when confronted with something we do not want to do (for whatever reason). If we truly want to do something, it will get done. Thus, identify the benefit that will derive from completing the project and not the negatives associated with doing the task or project. This mental trick works even if the only benefit is simply not having to worry about the uncompleted project any more.

Just remember, you cannot defeat a bad habit such as procrastination by attacking the problem itself. Instead, you must identify the mental or emotional cause of the problem and attack the cause with its opposite. This does not mean you can simply think your way out of procrastination. Thinking must be followed by some action.

This works even if the action is small. It can be small as long as it is also immediate and consistent.

Robert Taylor does extensive research into motivational and better life issues. More of his writings can be found at www.freewebs.com/wealthgazette/ .

The Current Financial Crisis Results from Unregulated Greed

The Nation’s Financial Crisis Resulted from the Follies of Capitalist Greed
By Robert N. Taylor
A folly is not just a mistake. It is a mistake whose outcome could have been clearly foreseen if the person committing the folly had merely applied logic and paid attention to historical lessons.
The above applies to the financial crisis currently rocking Wall Street and threatening to plunge the nation into a terrifying job losing, income reducing recession. Some of the decisions made by Wall Street financial experts, government regulators and capitalism-is-better-than-God politicians defy all rational thought.
The above culprits behaved as if the Great Depression of 1929 had never occurred. The essential lesson from that period came from the great British economist John Maynard Keynes. Keynes taught that capitalism - the so-called free enterprise system - had no self-regulating mechanism which guaranteed continual economic growth or full employment.
However, starting with President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and culminating in 1998 when President Bill Clinton signed legislation doing away with the Cass-Steagal Act, politicians eliminated most of the major regulations which had been put in place to prevent another Great Depression.
Former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan explained this before a Congressional hearing recently saying, “Our regulators became enablers instead of enforcers. Their trust in the wisdom of the markets was infinite.
This basically means that government regulators came to believe the myth that all regulation was bad and the best thing for the economy was to allow businesses to pursue their own greedy self-interest.
Thus, government stopped enforcing anti-recession rules and freed businesses, especially banks, to follow no regulation but that of pure greed. This is even though the Great Depression showed us that unregulated capitalism could produce tremendous profits in the short run but would lead to self-destruction in the long term as a result of excesses and mindless greed.
The chief example of this irrationality was not so much selling sub-prime loans to too many people with questionable abilities to repay; but allowing mortgage companies to sell these weak loans to investment banks which then magically converted them into securities and then sell the securities to other banks - both in America and abroad.
At each step in this process of greed, money handlers made a profit. But the financial geniuses lost track of the fact that housing prices were falling and the original suspect loans were not being repaid. When these loans were not repaid, the entire house of cards began to fall and we (taxpayers) ended up being forced to bailout the super rich to the tune of $700 billion because they made mistakes based on greed which blinded them to the underlying stupidity of what they were doing.
The bottom line is that capitalist greed must be regulated or that same greed will lead to folly and folly will lead to self-destruction.
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