Take 10 minutes to Learn why you procrastinate

I was a very bad Procrastinator for a very long time, until i really understood the basics of why i procrastinate.

In order to understand why you procrastinate, first you should have a strong desire to eliminate procrastination in your life and following the methods mentioned below will be helpful.

I. Track down your everyday activity

     When i first started writing down the list of activities that i do everyday, it felt like a waste of time. But later while analyzing the one month data i clearly understood why i don't have enough time to do the necessary activities and it narrowed down to the bad habits that i had created over time.

I was spending most of my time in Facebook and was affected by the "Chain-clicking curse" where watching a video from Facebook will lead to YouTube in-turn to Twitter to see the trend and it goes on and on into loads of unnecessary browsing wasting your precious time

II.Understanding why we procrastinate

We procrastinate because of the habits that we create over time. When we work some random thought strikes our mind, it might be as simple as,

where to go for the next vacation?

and I go to online to check details of it.
it doesn't stop there, then to Facebook to see where my friends went?
and something else catches up my eyes and the clicks goes endlessly

III. How we create Habits

I have been following this routine every day which let me do overtime to complete my work and had no time for the essential things in life. All of these made sense to me when i read the Power of habit by Charles Duhigg.

understanding the basic of habit was big help to me. I starts with a cue/Signal in my case it was the random thought and my routine was to search about it and reward that i get is leaving a stressful work for that moment/satisfaction by answering my random thought which sucks my time endlessly leaving only a very short period of time to do the necessary.

Now the trick it to replace the bad routine with a good routine which will lead to greater productivity in life, which could be understood by looking at how runners reward themselves
Here the cue is the Running shoe and it lets you to the routine of running which was created over time, running leads to the reward which is sense of accomplishment on completing a run also satisfying the Endorphin craving that you get by looking at the running shoe

IV. How I cured myself by changing my routine

1. Keeping myself distraction free

a. Turn off internet: Most of my work doesn't need internet so turned
     off my WiFi whenever i work.

b. Note pad: Whenever some random thoughts strike rather than
    searching it online i started recording them down in a small notepad and
    researched about them later

c. Setting Time limits: Started setting a duration to complete my work     
    which helped me to focus more on my work, Even had set time on
    socializing with my colleagues spending not more than 5 minutes on
    unnecessary talks.

2. Sustaining the habits

a. Tracking your activities: Its quite tough for me to write every activity      
    now and then, so i spent half an hour every day before sleeping to write
    down the activities of the whole day splitting into hourly activities and
    do a quick analysis on where to improve next day. It looks something    
    like this,

    9:00 - 10:00 : Forecast Meeting
    10:00 - 11:00 : Project#1 - Prepared the procedure

b. Prioritizing activities for tomorrow: This summary helps me in
    prioritizing the activities that i should be concentrating more tomorrow
    and I write down top 3 things that should be completed tomorrow

c. Monthly and Quarterly Review: then i started analyzing my monthly
    and quarterly data's to continuously improve my productivity

The methods mentioned above worked perfectly for me and I started finding more time to do the necessary things in life. Hope it will be useful for you as well, Let me know if it was helpful :)

Source :http://www.quora.com/What-can-I-learn-right-now-in-just-10-minutes-that-could-be-useful-for-the-rest-of-my-life