2 pills of FoA to cure procrastination

I’m spending this weekend with my nephew David. His parents are enjoying short diving break in Egypt. Dave is handsome teenager, who loves playing football. As most of teenagers he spends a lot of time browsing Facebook and chatting with friends. He doesn’t like studying and I’ve seen his parents losing patience due to this.

I love this young man because of his sense of humor, kindness and passion for sport.

I got a task to teach him German and physics – quite a challenge for me but as seasoned psychologist who loves ambitious projects, I thought to myself bring it on babe!

German was easy: simple vocabulary, few repetitions and exercises. I created funny crossword so that he remembers new words longer.

When we started talking about physics, he seemed discouraged and wanted to postpone it until tomorrow. I kept asking good old “whys” to get to the bottom of the issue. It turned out there are many reasons why he wants to put it off:

• He doesn’t like physics
• He doesn’t understand it
• He already got bad grade this year
• His brother is good at physics
• He feels the pressure but doesn’t know how to learn this subject

Procrastination is the avoidance of doing a task that needs to be accomplished by a certain deadline.

There are countless articles on the subject and one can get many ideas how to cure it. In my opinion we are all guilty of procrastination at some point in our lives and we probably implemented different solutions. Some psychologists say the best is to plan and strictly follow to-do list. Others say motivation is the key and you need to be excited about what you do. There are also influencers who think strong, positive habits will stop procrastination instantly. All those solutions focus on results which in principle is great but not applicable to some “delayers” as my nephew’s example. He wouldn’t be able to follow any to-do list or implement specific habits without help.

In order to help him in a simple but efficient why I decided to give him 2 FoA pills.

FoA means Focus on Action.

Thinking about big results like appreciation from parents or great grades at the end of school year might be too overwhelming and discouraging. Focus on Action means we are not thinking about end result we are just here and now. We focus on taking 2 actions from specific area each day. In the beginning it doesn’t matter what result you’re achieving. You might fail when it comes to final effect of the task but the most important is you keep taking action.

Every day take 2 FoA. Get it done. Don’t think about expectations, certificates, promotions and assessments. Take 2 pills of FoA and fight this horrible procrastination disease.