People Who Can’t Stop Procrastinating Often Hide Behind These 5 Sneaky Phrases
Procrastinators often disguise their delays with these self-sabotaging phrases.
Hikmet | Canva Do you have a procrastination habit you can't seem to get rid of? People use all sorts of little expressions to permit themselves to procrastinate. Too often, they don’t recognize they're trying to procrastinate when they use these words.
Distraction seeps into well-used words as a way to hide the loziness resting at their core. If you're aware of saying any of these phrases out of habit, you can alert yourself to the fact that you're delaying a task and procrastinating. Even the phrasings themselves are lazy in their brevity and ambiguity.
People who can’t stop procrastinating often hide behind these 5 sneaky phrases:
1. 'Just for now'
Have you ever said to yourself, "I’ll put this here, just for now"? You intend to come back in a little while, move the object, and put it away. Nine times out of 10, the object stays in that "just for now" spot for a long time.
Before you know it, you’ve piled a few more things in that just-for-now spot, and then you have a massive stack of clutter. Research on the relationship between procrastination and clutter suggested that "general procrastination tendencies may enable a lifelong pattern of responses to one’s environment that become increasingly maladaptive throughout the life cycle."
2. 'Later and someday'
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You tell yourself, "I’ll deal with this later." You don’t want to do it now, because it’s a huge stack of stuff. You think you don’t have time now to take everything to their assigned homes.
Maybe the real problem is that the objects don’t have assigned homes, and you don’t know where to put them. So, the "just for now" spot is their temporary home until it doesn’t work anymore.
Telling yourself you’ll do it later is a problem because "later" is not a time. "Later" never happens, just like "someday." When you say you want to wait to do something "someday, I always say that we have Sunday through Monday.
There's no such day as "someday," so "someday" will never come. And whatever it is you want to do won’t get done, unless you schedule it.
3. 'It will take too much time'
Quite often, we overestimate the amount of time something will take to do. We permit ourselves not to do it by saying to ourselves, "It will take too much time." In reality, we don’t know how much time something will take to do. If we don’t start, there’s no way to estimate when we will finish.
The perfectionist in us wants to know we have enough time to start and finish a task before even beginning. So, when we want to delay starting a task, we tell ourselves it will take too much time or more time than we have available at this moment. We delay, and then the question remains: When do we ever have exactly enough time?
4. 'I'll get around to it'
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Have you ever said, "I’ll get around to it," in response to someone asking you to do something? Joe Ferrari, the author of Still Procrastinating: The No Regrets Guide To Getting It Done, has a chip that he passes out to his audience members during his talks. Imprinted on the chip are the words "round2it."
He tells the audience to hang onto the chip to remind themselves to do whatever they said they’d get around to doing. This expression, because it doesn’t have a day or time associated with it, is another delay tactic. You never specifically say when you’ll get something done. You just indicate that when the spirit moves you, you will get around to it.
5. 'Just this once'
Saying this gives you permission to slack off or avoid completing a task. "Just this once, I’m not going to fold the sheets. I’m going to leave them in the laundry basket until I’m ready to put them on the bed."
"Just this once, I’m not going to empty the dishwasher. I’ll use the clean dishes from the dishwasher until the sink is full and there are no more clean dishes to use." Have you ever used this expression and then had it backfire on you?
Make it easier to recognize procrastination. When you become aware of the ways you trick yourself, you give yourself permission to avoid tasks or delay making a decision. Then it's easier to recognize the fact that you're procrastinating.
Life coach Jacqueline Neuwirth advised, "It’s easy to get caught in the trap of logical reasoning. There's a time and place to prioritize logic. When it comes to making a decision, listening to your heart or your gut is the best way to make decisions based on what you truly want."
Did you notice a theme in this list? Most of these expressions would not help you delay if you assigned a day and a time to the task at hand. If this is a habit you want to change, then keep this list handy and understand that when you use these expressions, you're hijacking your own efforts to get things done.
Diane N. Quintana is a Certified Professional Organizer®, Certified Professional Organizer in Chronic Disorganization®, Master Trainer, and owner of DNQ Solutions, LLC, based in Atlanta, Georgia.
