Procrastinators Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from chronic procrastination.

What feeds it?

Why do we put things off. Even things we know need our attention and we know full well if we avoid it, it could cause real pain later? What feeds this behavor?

an excellent question, Mary Lou

I've read a lot of stuff about this topic and I still don't know :).  Here's an amusing quote from Steve Pavlina (who has an excellent blog btw), from a list of ways to avoid being productive:

"Instead of doing your actual work, spend most of your time reading productivity blogs.  Within a few months, you’ll have acquired enough knowledge to start your own.  Eventually you’ll realize that 50% of the web consists of productivity tips written by chronic procrastinators.  The other 50% is porn. "

Seriously, I think for me several things lead to procrastination - one is fear of failure - second, feeling overwhelmed by all the things I need and/or want to do and - third, fear of success, because if I do this one project well, then I'll have to do even better next time. 

But it's probably different for everybody.  What do you think is the cause for you?

J.   

Why do we put things off?

That's a great quote from Steve Pavlina, journey.  So which half of the web is his site in?  :)

In general, I think we put things off for two reasons.  First, we're short-sighted -- we value the relief we get from procrastinating highly because it comes now.  After all the time we've spent growing up and trying to learn delayed gratification, we're right back to being six months old and wanting everything right this moment.

Second, we misjudge the difficulty of our tasks.  I have had several mornings where I spent half an hour doing what I thought would be a day's worth of work.  Why did I think that work would fill a day?

Combined, we end up with really scary tasks, and we run away from them to find temporarily release instead of working through them to get the real value of completion.

--
flexiblefine
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheNowHabit/