Breaking the cycle of procrastination

More often then not, confessions about procrastination sounds cool. With every day approaching the mid-year exam period, I see more and more facebook status updates about endless procrastination and people joining in funny groups like 'If you should be studying right now, then join this group'.

I have always been a chronic procrastinator but somehow (read: with the blessing of the Most Merciful) I have always managed to escape, however narrowly. This narrow escape over and over again has been the positive reinforcement I did not need -- I learnt that I will be okay even if I procrastinate... just need to pray harder when I am about to suffocate under my self-created piles of work.

Being a chronic procrastinator I am very familiar with feelings of massive sense of relief, associated with narrow escapes. I don't remember a time when I felt that I have given my best effort in anything... starting from preparing for HSC to a month of Ramadan. It has always been one of relief with a tinge of (sometimes overwhelming) guilt and regret, at the lost opportunity of doing better 'had I given my best effort'.

I know procrastination is a learned habit. If I was given the opportunity of totally undoing any of learnings, learning to procrastination would be first in line. I want to stop procrastinating!

Last year, when I was preparing for the final months of Honours, I remember feeling the same. It was then that I came across this dua in the Fortress of the Muslims: "O Allah I seek refuge to you from helplessness, laziness, lethargy, cowardliness, niggardliness and burden of debts and from being overpowered by men".

As usual, I forgot all about the dua as soon as my Honours finished.

But, like now, every now and then I feel over and over again, that I need the acceptance of that dua now and always.

Islamonline.net has some nice advices on ways to overcome procrastination. Starts off with the reminder of a very scary Quranic ayah: "Is he - who was once dead and then We revived him (through the True knowledge) and thus We appointed for him a light whereby he walks among people - comparable to one who is steeped in darkness, never able to come out of it?" (Al - An'am: 122)

The procrastinators will recognise this feelings right away: "steeped in darkness, never able to come out of it".

I do end up doing the work at the end, but the inability to start the task when I should is something I have never overcome!

The advices from Islamonline that I hope to turn to action:

1. Best way to fight procrastination is to take immediate steps to do the thing one is postponing. By repeating it over and over again, one learns to break the habit. This process must continue until one has learned the new habit and thus it becomes a second nature.

2. Start the morning by praying to Allah to grant you a successful day full of blessings.
Hadith: "Shaytan puts three knots at the back of the head of any of you if he is asleep. On every knot he reads and exhales the following words, 'The night is long, so stay asleep'. When one wakes up and remembers Allah, one knot is undone; and when one performs ablution, the second knot is undone, and when one prays the third knot is undone and one gets up energetic with a good heart in the morning; otherwise one gets up lazy and with a mischievous heart'. [Bukhari]

3. Try to start your work after Fajr for the Prophet prayed to Allah, "O Allah bless my Ummah in their early morning endeavors."

Three easy steps, apparently.

Okay no one promised that. Most of the time when I try to fix my faltering Iman and deficient practices, I focus on too many things at once. But with a long hard look at my failings over the years, I know procrastination plays a major role. So, now I want to focus on this and just this. I see so many other girls around me with the same problem. Would've been nice if we could somehow help each other. But, alas, a procrastinator can only make another procrastinator feel good about herself!

So let me start the journey by myself. Most of the time I take plans but they become forgotten soon afterwards because they go out of sight in a hidden away onenote file. Now that I documented my expressed desire of breaking out of the habit of procrastination, hopefully it will keep motivating me to break out of the cycle of chronic procrastination.

Wish me luck.