Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans – John Lennon
We are living in a so dynamic world that we have minimum bagful of tasks to do in a day in our professional as well as in personal life. We always want to complete all the tasks but all tasks could not get completed in a day. So here we start postponing our tasks. But first question arises in this situation that why couldn’t we complete our tasks? Lets find this answer first. We need to question ourselves that how many times we are present with our mind at the time of doing the particular task. If we can keep our mind in the present where we are doing our tasks, we can do the same task in a lesser time. Let us see an example to understand it more easily.
When we brush our teeth every morning, we take 5 minutes or sometimes 10/15 minutes or sometimes 10 seconds would also feels like ages. We should give enough time to brush our teeth but why do we need variable time to make it. This instance shows us that we are not present there in the task but wandering with our mind in many other things and that is how we delay to our tasks. We will see another example. If I have a task of cleaning the table everyday. It takes me 5 minutes to complete. Now if I keep my mind in the present and do the same activity, I can do it in 1 minute. This is how I can save on 4 minutes at my disposal. Do this experiment with yourself, you would definitely realise, how much time we can save in an entire day.
Postponing tasks or procrastination generally does not have anything to do with number of tasks or complexity or responsibility or lack of confidence or lack of skills. We do not keep our mind in the present so our mind starts wandering, it becomes an entertainment in our mind and we start postponing our tasks. Sometimes we wander in some of our happy moments in our past and sometimes we wander in sad or fearful moments in our life. We wander in our imagined future too with sad or happy feeling. These imagined feelings become our emotions in the present and we could not concentrate, where we are now. According to general behaviour of a human being, we tend to choose things, which are easy for us to do. We start choosing things or tasks, where our mind presence would not require to complete the task. We start postponing the important but critical or complicated tasks, where our mind presence is required. So lack of mind presence is the culprit of procrastination in most of the cases.
If you really want to learn to keep your mind in the present, get in touch with us here jeevan@mindhealth.in or +91-98220-24674