We all know it. Most of us are struggling with it. It is a force that compels us to postpone the scheduled tasks. It’s Jin of creativity and we all have it in itself. Procrastination is the behavior of putting off actions or tasks at a later time.

It isn´t shown in the manual work so much. Here we have the immediate feedback, we see immediate progress. The problem is the knowledge work at computer (programming, writing essays, writing reports, etc.). Other activities and interruptions are one click away and the feedback is a problem.

Slacker does not work purposefully. He just does not want to. Procrastinator wants to do the work, he has planned it. He might even enjoy it, but postponed it.

In book The War of Art by Steven Pressfield (author of the great historical war books), author called it resistance to creativity. I think it makes sense.

But what we can do? Here are my tips. (I am not the author, they are from site zenhabits.net etc.)

1. We are not lazy, just we have fear of failure.
2. We must change our mind. We have to outsmart ourselves.
3. We sometimes think too much. It is better to simply start and push forward.
4. Solid will is very misleading term. We must take advantage of motivation. Motivation is either positive (enthusiasm, the vision of rewards) or negative (non-threatening task). Positive motivation is better!
5. We can trick our minds with small steps. “I do not want to programming, I just start the editor. I just run this test. I only write one line of code …”
6. We can trick our minds with the vision of rewards. And we are enjoying a well deserved reward for completing a task.
7. We have big nasty task split into manageable tasks that do not take more than 20 minutes.
8. We can trick our minds with the vision of failure to overcome the fear of failure. “What if the program contains errors, which I had not noticed? Each program contains errors. And perhaps in this case is not about life, so what? Error will be reported later, and we will correct it.” That’s manageable, right? So let’s work

We know the enemy, we have guns and some kind of plan. Maybe it’s an endless war, but the chances of success are great. Look around you – there is so much great stuff. That does not arise by themselves, but by the work of people who put “resistance” on the ass. We can also do.

Good luck!