If procrastination was illegal, then our prisons would be a lot fuller than they are now. We are all guilty of waiting until a later date to do certain things. We are all familiar with what a vicious cycle it can be. If you are faced with a small task, you often put it off until later because you don’t feel like doing it. Then, as more and more small tasks arise, eventually, you are faced with the daunting task of tackling a million small tasks, making you even less willing to accomplish anything at all. Procrastination is one of the greatest self-defeating habits you can develop. We fail to start immediately even the most important of tasks, leading us to a state of mind in which we feel overwhelmed and unaccomplished. How do we begin to reverse these mindsets? How do we become the doers of deeds that we idolize so much?

At this point I just have to be honest with you and say that I don’t have a better answer than the one that you are tired of hearing. That is, just get it done. Unfortunately, this is because there isn’t a much better answer out there. The only thing that makes procrastination worse than we already think it is, is the fact that there isn’t really another cure aside from doing the exact opposite of what you’re doing (or not doing) right now.

As a society, we are very hung up on accomplishment. We are terrified of failure. This would probably be perplexing to any unbiased outsider who is able to objectively see that failure is a natural course our lives often take. Why then, to avoid failure in the short term, do we instead trade it in for failure in the long term, neglecting to accomplish things vital to our mental and physical health? People have all kinds of answers for why they procrastinate, all kinds of ways in which they justify any level of self destructive behavior.

We must silence the conversation about procrastination and adapt a new mentality: “stop thinking and start doing.” It is important that we begin to value contributions to the outcome more than we value time spent doing nothing. Our society as a whole has room to become much more productive than we are today. We must spend more time getting things done than we spend justifying not doing them. Sometimes, especially when tasks have piled up, “just starting” seems terrifying and impossible. But, it is the only way we will lead ourselves to a new age of accomplishment. We will enter a new age of starting today and not tomorrow.

Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll get to a point where quieting the avoidant noise in our heads becomes easy enough where we actually do things ahead of time.