If you suffer from procrastination a good time management strategy for you is to make procrastination enemy number one in your life. Procrastination deprives you of satisfaction, success, and happiness. It causes unnecessary stress, frustration, and pressure in your life. Procrastination is the biggest unnecessary and controllable time waster that exists. So how do you know if you are a procrastinator, and what do you do about it if you are?

If you are a procrastinator, you have probably made procrastination a life-long habit. Your time management strategy is never do today what you can put off until tomorrow. You don’t even start something until it’s almost impossible to complete the project by the deadline. When you finally make the commitment to take action you are a whirl of activity and you don’t allow anyone or anything to interrupt you because you have a deadline to meet. If your time management strategy was to approach all your projects with that level of fury and commitment from the moment you were first aware of the project you would have it done far in advance of the deadline and could move on to other things without having to deal with all that unnecessary stress.

Your negative attitude may be the cause or source of your procrastination. Your attitudes drive your behaviors and your behaviors drive your results, so if a negative attitude is fueling your procrastination including affirmations in your time management strategy is a good plan. Affirmations are positive statements about your ability to do the task at hand, the value of the project, the speed with which you can complete the project etc. All re-enforcing the positive impact of successfully completing the project on time or even ahead of time in your life.

Have you ever found that sometimes you procrastinate because of your fear of failure? This one may not be one that you openly admit to yourself, but if you start thinking back to the times you didn’t follow up with a potential client or didn’t submit your work so it could be considered for an award or whatever you have put off in the past you may realize that part of you didn’t want to get things completed because of your fear of what might happen if you failed. A time management strategy for you is to ask yourself what the potential outcomes are when you take the action you are supposed to take, and then make sure you are comfortable with those outcomes.

The opposite of fear of failure is fear of success. Your fear of success can be another reason for your procrastination. You may worry what others will think of your new found success. As part of your time management strategy you may want to explore the impact of succeeding and prepare yourself for the consequences.

Do you find that its hard to complete things because they’re just never quite good enough? Perfectionism can really get in your way. Recognize that perfectionism can never be achieved and that you can only do your best. It is a better time management strategy to just do something than to just keep putting it off. Zig Zigglar is frequently quoted as having said, “anything worth doing is worth doing poorly”. Perhaps his advice is something for you to take to heart.

Do you ever find yourself just stuck because you aren’t quite sure how to handle the task at hand? Yet, as you think about when you were in those situations in the past, when you finally got started did you find that it wasn’t as hard as you thought it would be? Whether you think it will be hard or if you get stuck working on the project a good time management strategy is to reach out quickly and get the help you need rather than just hoping you will somehow be able to work through it on your own.