ENFP Personality Type and Procrastination
“Assume there’s a logical reason behind your procrastination.”
How can an ENFP stop procrastinating?
Step one to defeating procrastination is assume that your brain, consciously and unconsciously, is intelligent and logical. What I mean by that is, whatever you’re actually doing with your body, whether that’s avoiding stuff you’re supposed to do, you know, procrastinating whatever it is, assume there’s a reason behind it, and there’s a logical reason, like your unconscious mind is making a choice.
One of the good ways to look at this is pain versus pleasure. Just assume that we’re motivated by one of these two things, either pleasure – we feel like by doing something, we’ll get a positive emotional reward or pain – we feel that by not doing something, we will avoid pain, right in the case of procrastination. So generally, if you’re avoiding something, if you’re procrastinating, it’s because of your unconscious mind, among other things.
There are other things I’m going to get into here. But among those, it’s because your unconscious mind is associated more pain with doing this thing than with not doing it.
As ENFPs we do things last minute
As ENFPs we beat ourselves up for procrastinating. We often beat ourselves up for procrastinating when really, we should just accept that we do things last minute and just do it last minute use that burst of adrenaline, get it done. In the week leading up to that instead of saying to ourselves, “Hey, I’m procrastinating, I need to stop!”, we’ll probably go to the beach and then we’ll focus on the work the night before. That’s one way to do it.
Another way is to change this pain-pleasure relationship by making things more enjoyable. For a while here in Prague, I had a personal trainer, nothing serious, but a bit of back pain from being a tall guy who works on laptops all the time, as you might expect. These workouts we did were intense, and ultimately, I did feel good after them. But I felt like I dreaded them pretty quickly, and so it did become a situation where when I was thinking about going to work out there was some dread because I did not enjoy this anymore.
So think about that. If there are things that you find tough, at least make it a little more enjoyable so you don’t end up procrastinating nearly as much.
3 Ways to stop procrastinating as an ENFP
So if I have to finish an hour of admin stuff, I’ll try to focus on how good it will feel when I get that done and hold on to that feeling. That will help bring me through it as well, and there’s three more things on top of this pain pleasure relationship that I think you can do to reduce or eliminate procrastination.
One of them is to use a forced environment. So I worked for myself, as you may or may not have gathered at this point and I work from a variety of places I have a home office, I have a co-working space I go to, I have another sort of office space / co-working setup, and then there’s a bunch of different cafes I work from, and I find different environments work really well for me for different types of work.
That could be because I now associate them with that, or it could just be something else, I don’t know. But if I want to get writing done and sort of more creative work, I go to a busy cafe, if I want to get work that I might tend to procrastinate, you know, go through my emails and clear out the ones I don’t need to respond to and that sort of thing, or do some kind of accounting work or whatever that is, I find that going to a co-working space works really well for me, because it puts me in this sort of professional environment.
Get this work done and then you can go home, and that works really great with me.
So maybe you can take your work to the library, to a cafe to a bar, like whatever is in your neighbourhood and just get it done. Try that as well and that might actually also help with the pain-pleasure side. Because if you go somewhere that’s a little more lively, a little more fun, it will make it more enjoyable, and you’ll get it done that way as well. But I find that really helps if I go somewhere with one thing to do. Like I bring the paperwork with me to a cafe, or co-working space, I say I’m not leaving until this is done, that can work really well.
But that leads me to my next point – If you want to procrastinate three hours a day of the stuff you do, you need to find new work that you enjoy doing more. If you’re always procrastinating your work, you’re doing the wrong thing, and you need to make a serious change.
Hopefully, I can help you do that here on this channel. If not, I’m sure there are other resources. But that’s the biggest thing. If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing at all, you’re gonna procrastinate. It’s that simple pain-pleasure equation.
Lastly, if you do find that you procrastinate things that maybe you actually do enjoy, like, it doesn’t even really make sense. There may be something going on with your brain chemistry, and things like exercising more frequently, eating healthier, fewer carbs, might actually help.
So I hope you found at least a couple things there that will help you with your procrastination try them out.
I recommend you also check my article on A Perfect Routine for ENFPs and INFPs and perhaps How To Become Disciplined as an ENFP or INFP