How can you train yourself to stop procrastinating?  You can challenge your assumptions and get feedback on activities where you tend to procrastinate.  A technique you can use to help you is the Antiprocrastination Sheet.  This technique is for any activity that you’ve been avoiding because you think it will be difficult and unrewarding. You use it to test your negative assumptions and find out how accurate or off-base your negative expectations really are.

In Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy Revised and Updated, David Burns writes about The Antiprocrastination Sheet technique.

Summary of Steps
According to Burns, the key steps for creating an Antiprocrastination Sheet are as follows:

• Step 1 – Create the Antiprocrastination Sheet.
• Step 2 – List your tasks.
• Step 3 – List your predicted difficulty and predicted satisfaction.
• Step 4 – List your actual difficulty and actual satisfaction.

Step 1 – Create the Antiprocrastination Sheet.
According to Burns, to create the Antiprocrastination sheet:

1. Draw five lines down a piece of paper. This will divide the sheet into 6 columns.
2. Label the columns: Date, Activity, Predicted Difficulty (0-100%), Predicted Satisfaction (0-100%), Actual Difficulty (0-100%), Actual Satisfaction (0-100%) See the example below.

Step 2 – List your tasks.
According to Burns, in the Activity column, break the activity down into small steps (chunk it up.)

Step 3 – List your predicted difficulty and predicted satisfaction.
According to Burns, write your predictions down using a 0- to- 100 percent scale, how difficult and rewarding each step would be.

Step 4 – List your actual difficulty and actual satisfaction.
According to Burns, after completing each step, write down how difficult and rewarding it actually was.

Example Antiprocrastination Sheet
Burns includes an example of an Antiprocrastination Sheet:

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