First, realize that procrastination is not the actual problem. The problem is on what you procrastinate. Most people have this totally messed up. They procrastinate on important things that would make them successful. And things that have negative or no impact on their life, they do right away. Seems to me, that people are quite good at doing ridiculous things that don't make sense. Why in the world would anyone do this?
Because your brain works by patterning. This is one of the most important things I learned from NLP. Your brain patterns things and then does them over and over again. The natural tendency is to keep doing what you're already doing. But sure enough by doing what you're already doing you continue getting what you're already getting. To have what you've never had, you must do what you've never done.
One way to overcome procrastination, is to do it anyway. It's not even doing it. It's starting it. Once you start something, even if it's something unpleasant, after a while it'll be actually hard for you to stop before it's finished. So it's not that you associate more pain to doing it than not doing it (that's what most articles on procrastination would have you believe). It just goes against the natural flow of your brain. But once you get started, no problem. Your brain continues to carry on until the task is finished.
Procrastination is not something you do, but rather something you don't do. Most people would tell you something like: “I just can't get myself to do it”. Listen to how that sounds. “You” can't get “yourself” to do something. Of course you cant! You are yourself.
I constantly see articles on procrastination, that suggest all kind of weird methods. Like breaking your task into smaller pieces, and then rewarding yourself for every milestone you complete. So, if you wanted to write an article, you would take a bowl of grapes and reward yourself a grape for every sentence you complete. Sounds absurd, doesn't it. The idea here is to trick yourself into doing it. But by doing that you don't actually solve the problem. Instead you temporarily avoid it. This goes back to the idea of fighting with yourself. Instead of eliminating procrastination, you have to fight with it over and over again.
But here's a simpler approach. Every time you find yourself procrastinating, you have 3 choices of dealing with it:
You do nothing about it and wait until it becomes absolute must, or disappears. This is what most people do. They plan by avoiding disaster. Instead of doing what they want, they try to avoid what they don't want from happening. Of course this greatly limits the level of success you are capable of, because the only things that you get done are the things that cause you pain if they are left undone. And most things that are worth doing are easy not to do.
You push yourself to get started, and then once you've started, continuing on is quite easy. This is what a lot of people do as well. The problem is you have to push yourself over and over again to get anything started. It's no different than overcoming fear with courage. It works, but it's not a good strategy. You motivate yourself so much, that you feel compelled to do it and procrastination is not an issue anymore.
This is what successful people do. That's why they are successful. They are able to easily motivate themselves. They can't wait to get up and to start their day.
Even though it's as simple as that, procrastination seems to be a BIG issue with a lot of people. People even do it first thing in the morning. Their alarm clock rings. Instead of turning it off and bouncing out of bed, they push that button that gives them 10 more minutes of sleep. After the 10 minutes they push it again. Then they start telling themselves that they are going to be late for work and be fired. They do that until they can threaten themselves enough, so that they feel motivated to get up. Talk about a bad way to start your day, huh :).
So at the end it comes down to doing it. Why make this more complex than it needs to be. Do you have the ability to do what you procrastinate on? Sure you do. Then go do it. The time is going to pass anyway.
"This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time"
-Fight Club(movie)
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