Even the founder of Microsoft has admitted to having bad habits.
In a conversation with the talented investor and close friend Warren Buffett, Bill Gates revealed a “very bad habit” that he was sure many people shared: procrastination, leaving everything until the last minute.
Gates shared that this bad habit started when he was a student at Harvard University. “I liked to let people see that I wasn’t doing anything, that I didn’t go to class, and that I didn’t care,” Gates said. However, as deadlines loomed, such as exams or essay submissions, he would start working.
“Many people would think that’s fun. It seemed to become my brand: the guy who doesn’t do anything until the last minute,” Gates added.
However, when he dropped out of college and started building the Microsoft empire, Gates realized that this habit wasn’t helping him and had to let it go.
“No one praised me for doing things at the last minute,” Gates said, acknowledging that letting go of this bad habit helped him achieve success in life and his career.
“Procrastination” is a common bad habit that many people struggle with. While it may be easy to recognize this bad habit, it’s challenging to break free from it. According to psychologists, procrastination is one of the hardest habits to break because it’s not just about self-control but also influenced by various factors such as mood, anxiety, worry, or lack of confidence.
“Procrastination is an issue of emotion regulation, not time management,” said Tim Pychyl, a psychology professor at Carleton University in Canada.
Psychologists suggest that one solution to tackle procrastination is to practice “effective procrastination,” which means that when you want to delay one task, switch to another task that needs to be done instead of wasting time on unproductive activities like scrolling through social media or watching entertainment videos.
Some “temporary” tasks you can do while procrastinating include going for a walk, tidying up your desk, or deleting junk emails, which will help improve your mood before returning to the main task.
Additionally, breaking down your to-do list into high-intensity and low-intensity tasks can help overcome procrastination. This way, you can tackle the high-intensity tasks first and leave the low-intensity ones for the end of the day.
Of course, successfully overcoming procrastination still largely depends on one’s consciousness and determination.
