How I DEFEATED inaction and procrastination!

Life Uncluttered #1

We have all found ourselves in spots where we have a massive pile of work pending but we still tend to lay flat and procrastinate it till it is very late.

Usually, the habit is not because we are irresponsible but because of the feeling of overwhelm! Overwhelm forces us to distract ourselves as the pile is too daunting to be resolved straight away.

The solution however to this is to use the SUNK COST FALLACY i.e. to do only as much as is realistically possible and let go of the sunk cost.

The other way I look at the situation is to introduce ‘Incentives and disincentives’. The idea is to reward yourself at the end of each activity through an incentive, the incentive would work better if it is immaterial rather than a material trade-off. Similarly disincentivize the vice-versa(again as immaterial as possible).

An example for this is that whenever I used to attach my performance in an exam to my own identity (quite extreme but you can adjust the degree of extremity on the basis of your appetite) which makes the incentive quite immaterial I performed exceptionally well! compared to when I would just do it for a material gain.

This was a short dump of my thoughts. I hope the concept of ‘INCENTIVES and DISINCENTIVES’ will help you in your life.

I write the articles in 3 segments - Life Uncluttered(where I write insightful articles like this one), My Experiments (where I take up challenges and journal them), Miscellaneous(here I cover articles in finance, geopolitics, and other interesting domains).

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