How to Beat Your Procrastination at Work

Procrastination is an employee's dream. What's not to love about earning the average American $39,000 salary and using company time to call your friends, surf the Internet for great deals on furniture, and talking with your co-workers about the controversial movie on HBO last night? Well, I can tell you someone that may not like your little daytime social party. How about the company? The company has invested their trust, faith, time, and money into you and here you are disrespecting them and procrastinating from being productive because the Internet is too much of a tease. The truth of the matter is we're all procrastinators to a certain extent. Companies expect that you will not work every single second of the day, but according to a recent America Online survey, individuals are wasting up to 2 hours a day on tasks other than their workload. Here are a few ways that you can beat your procrastination and join the real world again:

Admit your procrastination.

They always say the first indication that you have a problem is denial. Your procrastination habits are no different. In fact, most people consider themselves "good" employees. For all they know, their procrastination is the same thing that every other employee in the office is doing. Well, folks, it's not that simple. You don't have to be like every employee. Just because you hear people making personal phone calls during work time doesn't mean you have to do it. You can't possibly expect to be a better employee if you are blind and ignorant of your bad work habits.

Set a schedule.

Start off each day by scheduling out your entire workload for the day. It's important to do this in the morning because you're thinking clearly and fresh. One of the reasons most people procrastinate is because of the lack of planned breaks. Most employees only have a lunch break; therefore throughout the day they have justified taking thirty minute breaks at a time. I recommend scheduling a break before and after lunch for no more than ten to fifteen minutes at a time. It's important that you have the breaks, but it's even more important that you don't abuse the time.

Break the tasks down.

Depending on what line of work you're in, you can break a large project into smaller tasks so that you can take a short break in between them. A common reason people procrastinate is because they are burdened with a large project and they aren't motivated to take on such a big task. By breaking it down, you're concentrating your efforts for a small, fixed time as opposed to an all day burnout session. Setting small goals will motivate you to move on to the next one.

It's also important that you do each task one at a time. Limit visits to your cubicle and if you need to get a task done then don't answer phone calls. If you feel the urge to work on something else then just push that urge aside and continue to plug away at the task at hand. That urge is the voice inside telling you to stop working so you can play on the Internet. Resist it. It's not going to do you any favors down the road.

Change the way you view your job.

Many employees that procrastinate view their job as a burden or a prison between 9:00-5:00. Try to change that way of thinking. Think of your job as an opportunity or a chance to make a living. Instead of thinking "What's in it for me?" try to approach it as what you want to do for the company. When you wake up in the morning, be thankful that you have a house, family, and job to go to each and every morning.

Find some internal motivation.

Motivation is the number one factor in killing procrastination. Again, change your train of thought. Stop thinking that you're at your job because someone said you ought to work there. You want to be great at your job. You want to impress your boss, help your co-workers, help the company benefit from you work, and make money. Eliminate the source of avoidance, whether it's a co-worker you don't like or a bad job evaluation. Think of who you're really working for. Your family is depending on your income and if you're putting yourself in a position to be fired by lack of production then you're not doing you or your family any favors.

Those are just a few ways you can beat procrastination in the work environment. Good luck with it all and stop reading this. Get back to work!