How To Beat Procrastination - Recognising The Little "Justs" That Waste Years Of Your Life

How often do you find yourself fully intending to settle down and create something new, but only after you've "just" checked your email, or "just" made a snack, or "just" reorganised your pens, paints or materials?

This collection of little "justs" adds up to a lot of minor activity and very little creativity.

These kind of procrastination techniques are common to us all, and most of the time their greatest strength in stopping us creating is convincing us that all these little "justs" are insignificant, and aren't really stopping us from creating.

So what if you do take a few minutes to check your email every now and then? Does it really make much of a difference? What if you do spend 10 minutes rearranging your supplies before you go to create, does it have much of an impact on creating?

Let's look first at the raw facts, the time involved.

Say it takes you only 3 minutes to check your email. And you do this every half an hour. In a typical working day of 8 hours, that's 48 minutes checking email. 48 minutes out of a day of 24 hours is a little over 3%.

If you lived to 70, spending 3% of your life checking emails (or an equivalent "just" habit), that's over TWO YEARS of your life!

Are you happy that you're going to spend two years of your life doing something of such little significance, especially when many of those times when you went to check there was nothing new of any significance to see anyway?

And this is just the time you can actually measure. The real damage comes from how these little habits stop you ever getting any flow or momentum going with your creative work.

The first step to beating procrastination is to actually admit that you procrastinate.

Once you take that step, step up and say - "Yes I procrastinate, I spend time on fairly insignificant activities as a way of avoiding creating what really matters" - then you're in a very strong position to take the next step to overcome it.

Admitting you procrastinate is a positive, empowering step.

You're ready to put an end to these time wasting habits, to take back control of your creative life, and to create on your terms, when you want, how you want, and without distraction from some minor insignificant task you "just" have to do first.

Take that step today, admit you procrastinate, and prepare yourself for the next step in beating procrastination.

And if you're ready to beat procrastination and set your creativity free in the next 21 days, check out the powerful ecourse "7 Steps To Freedom: How To Beat Procrastination And Set Your Creativity Free" at http://www.HowToBeatProcrastination.com

For your free 7 article series on the first steps to beating procrastination, head over to http://www.CoachCreative.com/procrastinationarticles.html