Many employees often undertake big, long-term projects at work. It may be a project with no definite deadline, or with a deadline that is several months away.

These are the projects that often create the most anxiety, says business consultant Peter Bregman. Sometimes they lead to procrastination, until the deadline looms before you. Often, you may not even know what you need to do to get started, and when you do start, you find that you don’t know everything you need to know or have the skills you need to finish it, Bregman says. And, other more urgent things keep popping up, so we lay the long-term project aside.

The standard advice to getting a big project done is to break it up into smaller parts, concentrate on the next step to move ahead, and set incremental deadlines along the way. It’s good advice, Bregman says, but it’s not enough.

It’s not enough because it doesn’t address the real culprit behind our procrastination – our fear of failure. We are afraid that we will fail, Bregman says, that we will spend all of our time on it, neglecting other things, and in the end it won’t be very good anyway.
So how do we handle this fear – the elephant in the room?

Don’t pretend it’s not there, Bregman says, acknowledge that you are afraid. Don’t try to downplay it, because that is just another form of denial – denying the reality of the situation. It’s a natural feeling. Moreover, Bregman says, by trying to ignore it, we stoke that fear even more, because it’s always there in the background gnawing at us.

But by admitting to your fear, you also are admitting that you may not be able to meet your expectations, Bregman says. By doing this, you are acknowledging that your effort is not going to be perfect.  This will help you get started, because it is that desire for perfection, or something close to it, that often prevents us from moving ahead.

Also, by accepting your fear, you also are accepting the fact that you don’t have everything you need to get your project done, and this in turn will spur you to seek out the information, skills or other support you need, Bregman says.

After you have confronted and accepted your fear, make the project a priority. In fact, Bregman says, make it one of your top five priorities. To do this, you may have to figure out what you are going to bump off your priority list in order to make room for the project.

Then, he says, you can go back to the standard advice of breaking it up into parts focusing on those parts and setting deadlines in your calendar.

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