Your Willpower Is Not Broken - Procrastination's Real Cause
If you find yourself having difficulty completing your goals
, you might blame it on the lack of willpower. If your willpower was stronger, you'd be able to get yourself to follow through - Right?
In reality, recent research has shown that lack of willpower isn't the cause of procrastination. In fact, willpower has very little to do with procrastination.
==> Why Using Willpower Doesn't Work
A lot of people think of willpower as the main tool for creating sustained motivation. Unfortunately, that's just not how willpower works at all.
Instead, willpower works more like a rocket ship's takeoff blast. It can give you a sudden burst of power, but your willpower just isn't designed for sustained propulsion.
Trying to use willpower every day to get yourself to workout even when you don't want to just doesn't work. Instead, you should turn your willpower towards designing systems and methodologies that actually eliminate procrastination.
==> What Causes Procrastination?
If procrastination isn't caused by the lack of willpower, what is it actually caused by?
By and large, procrastination is caused by not having strong systems in place that make tasks easy to perform.
Let's say you want to motivate yourself to track all your expenses every day. But you just never really get around to it.
In reality, it's not that you lack the willpower to track your expenses. You already have the desire to do so; it's just that the amount of effort outweighs the perceived benefits of tracking your expenses.
You can change this with systems.
==> Systems: The One Place Where Willpower Matters
Your willpower is a limited commodity. That's why it's so important to use it on the things they'll actually make a difference.
It takes effort to design a system. Again, taking the example of tracking your expenses, a system might look something like:
* An iPhone app that allows you to enter your expenses quickly.
* A Mint.com account that tracks all your credit card transactions.
* A spreadsheet with your income and total expenses.
* A time every week to enter your expenses from your iPhone to the excel spreadsheet.
If you didn't think it through and create a system, the nebulous task of "track my expenses" will seem very stressful and difficult to do.
However, once you have a specific system in place, it becomes a lot easier to get yourself to stick to what you wanted to do.
Your willpower should be applied towards getting yourself to create that system. Use your willpower to make hard things easy, then use your willpower to give you the push you need to get your new system off the ground.
Once you start building a new habit with a system that makes something that was hard easy, you won't need much willpower to keep that habit going.
To make a long story short, don't beat yourself up for not having enough willpower to achieve your goals. Your willpower was never meant to be a sustained source of motivation. Instead, use your willpower to get yourself to design new systems and implement those systems. Then let the systems do their jobs from there.
by: Angel Noyal
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