SAPIENTIA
Procrastination Pointers
Procrastination is one of the biggest enemies we have to our
Personal Productivity. Thinking about doing something and
planning to do it are fine, but what if we fail to move
ahead?
Procrastinating the unimportant items in our day is a useful
talent. The problem for many, however, is that we are
procrastinating the important and crucial items in our day,
reducing our personal productivity and increasing our stress
levels.
Here are five pointers to help you to better overcome
procrastination. (You can implement them now, or perhaps
tomorrow, or better yet, next week.)
1. Daily planning the night before
"People don't plan to fail but they sometimes fail to plan". Without a
plan of action in place before you arrive for work it is real easy to
get caught up in "stuff". The phone rings, someone drops by and you
direct your time responding to the loudest voices demanding your
attention rather than to the most important priorities on your plate.
A plan of action, prepared the night before is like a roadmap for the
next day. You know what your next step ought to be to get you into
productive action and away from procrastination.
2. Work with a clean desk
"Out of sight, out of mind." The reverse of that is just as true. When
it's in sight, it's in mind and most of us cannot help but be
distracted and our time is then directed to the less important and
easier tasks causing us to put off the more important tasks. Working
with a clean desk or clean work environment permits us to have only
the most important task before us so that we can focus all of our
attention on that task without other visual distractions.
3. Reduce large projects to bite-sized pieces
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Tomorrow you plan to
work on a three-hour project. The problem is, many of us do not get
three hours to work on any one item. We have to contend with
interruptions, meetings, etc. (I don't know that I even have an
attention span that lasts for three hours!) And we often wind up
procrastinating working on this task because "there's not enough time
to get this done". So, instead of scheduling the entire three-hour
project for tomorrow, schedule a small bite, a step or two that might
take 20 or 30 minutes. Then put the next step on the next day's To Do
list and the next step after that on that next day's list, etc. It may
take several days, but you will get that elephant eaten up, one bite
at a time.
4. Plan around interruptions
Interruptions tend to occur in identifiable patterns. I get most of my
interruptions early in the day versus later in the day. I get most of
my interruptions early in the week versus later in the week. So, if I
plan a big project first thing Monday morning, I'm creating stress
because as soon as I begin, interruptions arrive and re-focus my
attention causing me to procrastinate what I really wanted to do. It
is so much easier swimming downstream with the current rather than
bucking the tide. Therefore, I plan those larger projects for later in
the day and later in the week when I tend to get fewer
interruptions.
5. Assign deadlines
Have you ever failed to achieve a New Year's resolution? If so, that
probably happened because you did not set a deadline. Deadlines move
us to action. Without a deadline, things wind up in our "as soon as
possible" pile, a "Never Never Land" where items will get attended to
"someday", "when I get the time".
Written by Dr. Donald E. Wetmore