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Coursera

Overcome Procrastination: Procrastination Mastery

via Coursera

Overview

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Chris Croft is an international speaker, author, and management trainer with more than 20 years of experience helping individuals and organizations improve performance. Known for his practical, engaging teaching style, Chris combines real-world examples with actionable techniques that learners can apply immediately in their everyday lives. This course gives you practical, beginner-friendly tools to overcome procrastination in work, study, and personal life. You’ll start by understanding what procrastination is, why it matters for your long-term progress and well-being, and how it affects stress, confidence, and results. You’ll learn the major causes of procrastination, how self-discipline actually works in daily life, and how to spot whether a task is being delayed because it feels big, bad, or boring. From there, you’ll go hands-on with targeted strategies for each type of procrastination. For overwhelming tasks, you’ll practice breaking work into manageable steps, using simple scheduling tactics, and applying action-first methods to beat analysis paralysis. For unpleasant or scary tasks, you’ll learn to use start-first techniques, reward systems, visualization, and fear-reframing to reduce resistance and build courage. For dull or repetitive work, you’ll design your environment to make tasks easier to start, use accountability and opportunity-framing to stay engaged, and turn recurring chores into sustainable habits. By the end of the course, you’ll create a personal experimentation plan, combine multiple techniques into response plans for your own tasks, and know how to keep improving your focus, follow-through, and self-discipline over time.

Syllabus

  • Introduction to Overcoming Procrastination
    • This opening module introduces procrastination as a common human behavior and helps learners start diagnosing it in their own work, study, and daily life. You will examine the warning signs of procrastination, explore why people delay important tasks, and connect self-discipline to practical action. The module also introduces the course’s full toolkit of techniques and helps you create an initial plan of attack for a real task you have been avoiding.
  • BIG - Procrastinating Because It's Overwhelming
    • This module focuses on tasks that feel so large or complex that starting them seems difficult. You will work through practical ways to reduce overwhelm by scheduling time, breaking work into smaller steps, acting before every detail is perfect, and improving the energy needed to follow through. These techniques are useful for major assignments, long-term projects, planning work, and any responsibility that feels bigger than your current motivation.
  • BAD - Procrastinating Because It's Unpleasant Or Scary
    • This module addresses tasks that get postponed because they feel uncomfortable, intimidating, or emotionally heavy. You will practice techniques for starting hard tasks first, rewarding progress, visualizing future outcomes, questioning your fears, making difficult work more engaging, using accountability, and shifting unhelpful self-talk. These strategies can help with high-stakes conversations, challenging assignments, difficult calls, and other tasks where fear or dread gets in the way.
  • BORING - Procrastinating Because It's Dull
    • This module focuses on the tasks that are not frightening or overwhelming but still get ignored because they feel tedious. You will learn how to redesign your environment, use accountability, spot hidden benefits, batch work into focused bursts, build routines, and delegate when appropriate. These methods are especially useful for recurring chores, paperwork, reading, maintenance tasks, and other necessary work that rarely feels exciting but still needs to get done.

Taught by

Chris Croft

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