Are you a procrastinator? Dawn shares some strategies that have helped her with her tendency to procrastinate. Show transcript: Hey there, I'm Dawn Starks, author of Simplify Your Financial Life and your host for the SimpleMoney Podcast, where we make personal finance simple. Welcome. This is Episode 148: Let's Talk Procrastination. I'm just going to say it straight out. I'm a procrastinator. I have always been a procrastinator and I probably always will be a procrastinator. So even when I know I'm procrastinating, I still can't always stop myself from procrastinating. So I wanted to talk a little bit today about procrastination and some things that you can do, some things that have helped me to get past my procrastination, even though I'm still a work in progress. So procrastination is problematic because it tends to add stress to our lives. So for example, this is always my classic example because it's the thing that I probably procrastinate on the most and the most consistently, and that is preparing my tax returns. So this year we even got an extension on preparing our taxes, a free extension because of the pandemic. And I was all set and ready to do them in March. And then of course the deadline got pushed out and I thought to myself, "Ooh, I'm going to do them anyway. I'm going to get them done, and just be done with it." But of course I didn't. I procrastinated because something else popped up that seemed more important at the time. And since the taxes weren't on fire, I set them aside. So then what happens is that time goes by, time goes by, and I'm just thinking about the taxes for all those weeks and months. And finally, I got it done within days of the new revised deadline. So that is my classic procrastination, when it comes to tax preparation. But let's talk a little bit about what causes procrastination. So professionals will say that perfectionism is at the root cause of procrastination, that people who are perfectionists won't start a project because they want it to be perfect. They're not content for it to just be kind of halfway done or just kind of a mediocre job. They want it to be perfect and so they pause on getting started on the project until they feel like they will be able to give it their all and make it perfect. So unfortunately that throws us into analysis paralysis. So we get frozen because we're so busy thinking about how are we going to make the conditions exactly right in order to do this project or this task. Exactly right, so that it's perfect. And then we just freeze. And this is a real thing. I mean, this happens to people. This is not particularly my issue. I do like things to be right. But I don't think that I'm a perfectionist because I'm okay with things being good enough. Certainly depends on the case. It depends on what it is, but I don't think procrastination is my - I'm sorry, I don't think, perfectionism is the root cause of my procrastination. Instead, I just like to avoid unpleasant tasks. That's the other cause of procrastination is just avoidance. Usually people don't procrastinate something that's pleasant, you know, going to get ice cream, people don't procrastinate that. Watching a great show on TV, they don't procrastinate that. They only procrastinate for unpleasant tasks, things that they dread doing. And that is, I think, the root cause of my procrastination, is that I anticipate that the project or the task is going to be horrible or gross or otherwise unpleasant, and I just want to put it off. The problem is, is that by not wanting to face that event that you have to go to, that person you have to talk to, that task you have to do - by not doing it, then you're sort of torturing yourself more because you're thinking about it for all those minutes or hours or days or weeks leading up to the thing that you're procrastinating. You're putting it off so you're kind of torturing yourself for longer. And that, in essen
