Do you have the habit of putting things off till the last minute? Well, you’re not alone. Most of us are guilty of procrastination at some point in our lives.
But the problem is that you don’t often realize the damage it can do to you – both on your personal and professional levels.
Procrastination can make you feel like you’re winning by avoiding the pain and displeasure of facing your most disliked work. But eventually, it can affect your career, relationships, and most importantly, your mental health.
So let’s find out why procrastination is so dangerous and why you need to stop procrastinating now.
1. Kills Your Productivity
According to studies, procrastination often comes from the fear of failure and the possibility of being rejected. So it’s very comforting to be able to delay things, even if it’s for a matter of minutes.
But the problem is that, in doing so, you often tend to overestimate your capabilities by considering that you can conquer piles of work within a few hours.
The truth, however, is just the opposite. By delaying things till the last minute, you’re only killing your productivity. That’s because it puts you under terrible pressure to complete your job within a limited time frame. This means that you are now forced to act faster than you can.
So instead of focusing on the quality of your work, you have to focus on meeting your deadline. This will have a major effect on your efficiency and decrease your productivity too.
2. Results in Poor Decision Making
Just like procrastination kills productivity, it results in poor decision-making capabilities too. As mentioned before, when you delay things off for later, you are actually under the pressure of completing your task within a limited time-frame.
This time constraint can massively damage your decision-making capacities. Good decisions come only from a proper understanding of the subject you’re working on. This isn’t possible when you’re in a hurry to get things done.
So instead of collecting all the information and processing it rationally, you now have to depend on heuristics. Although it’s a good way of getting your job done faster and meeting your deadlines, relying on heuristics may sometimes lead to poor decision-making. That’s because you’re relying on your own understanding of the task rather than relying on facts.
3. Affects Performance
You’ve seen how procrastination can lead to poor decision-making. And the impact of bad decisions is always reflected in your performance. When you make bad decisions, you actually fail to accurately forecast the result that a specific action can lead to.
And because of that, your performance starts degrading too. If this happens at work, you’ll not only damage your reputation by attracting negative feedback, but you can also lose your job. So try accomplishing your tasks without delaying them for later.
4. Causes Stress and Anxiety
In addition to the obvious impacts discussed above, procrastination can also contribute to building up stress and anxiety. Sometimes you may miss your deadline due to procrastination. This means that more work gets piled up. This will instantly increase your stress level.
Also, every time you miss a deadline, the pressure to perform better increases too. This can often result in frustration and can cause friction at work. If this happens too often, you start feeling depressed and demotivated. It can also affect your sleep, which in turn can result in constant fatigue. All of this can be extremely dangerous for your health in the long run.
Procrastination is often confused with laziness. But unlike laziness, procrastination is a conscious decision made by yourself to avoid doing something important in order to do something that’s easier and more enjoyable. Although it sometimes appears to be comforting, giving in to such impulses too often can lead to serious consequences. So stop procrastinating now.