Procrastination is one of the most pernicious monsters of the business world; it crawls up and down the corridors of offices devouring success and achievement. It hides in files, and lurks in the backs of drawers. It loves the bottom of ‘to do lists' and celebrates coffee breaks and smoking rooms, (well it did until they where made illegal, it now stands around outside in the new smoking shelters). Its favourite resting place is in pending trays. Pending trays on desks of managing director or in the post room, it makes no difference to him. Sitting there,  cowering, and daring anyone to come near. Its nest is made of the tasks which, if only given sufficient attention, would not only transform the profitability of departments or businesses, but even whole economies.
So, who will slay this beast, who will free us from this dragon? I am sorry, but St George died with the era of chivalry, to which he and his like belonged. There is no knight in shining armour, this battle is yours, and it is mine. Each of us will have to face and defeat this dragon, this beast procrastination ourselves. However, if you are going to face a dragon, you better go prepared.
Why is procrastination so damaging?
Submitting to procrastination is much more harmful than just having your progress slowed down. Procrastination, if not slain will not only slow down your own work, but may also lead to some tasks being neglected or perhaps even overlooked permanently. Consider too it's more hidden or subtle effects. Procrastination nearly always sows the seeds of guilt and stress, and even worse it clogs up your subconscious mind.
If you do not believe that you have sown guilt in your mind, just what do you think causes that hollow, sinking feeling or the flush that comes over you when you find that folder, or when someone asks about the progress of this or that task?
 You may believe that, once procrastination is nesting snugly on top of one of your tasks, that you have put that job out of your mind, at least for the time being. Actually all you have done is just to park it in your subconscious. Here it will continually be taking up time and energy from active tasks, just like opening too many programmes on a computer and when you finish, just leaving it open. Soon your computers memory is getting clogged.
On top of this, bad working practices are being reinforced.
This situation is bad enough, but consider the knock on effect. Corporately this could be huge. Just picture a department with 1,000 people all adding their ineffectiveness to the corporate productivity. Much of the time this corporate procrastination will be exponential with the resulting delay and ineffectiveness snowballing out of all imagined proportion.
In business, whether working for yourself or within an organisation it is vital that we put to death the beast procrastination.
Why do we procrastinate?
If procrastination is so bad for us, if it will stifle our productivity, put strain on us emotionally and mentally, and if it is so deleterious to the health of our economy, why do we let procrastination into our lives?
I believe that if we were truthful with ourselves we have been lead into denying that WE have a problem with procrastination. Procrastination is a problem that others have. We may actually procrastinate, but we have it under control, the beast is caged.
In fact the truth is that we all suffer from procrastination to one degree or another. The question should not be ‘do we suffer from procrastination?', but ‘do we have effective techniques to help us to overcome procrastination on a daily basis?'
Danger signs to look out for!
 Do you have a task that is too big or daunting to tackle?
When a job is unpleasant we will often put it off until later. If it is too hard we may leave it until we have had more time to think about it, or until we have the energy to tackle it. This may in fact be a very sensible thing to do. A hard job, late one afternoon, may be more easily tackled when you are fresh in the morning. Sometimes after giving yourself time to think you may find a good way to solve a big problem. All too often though it is not just put off until the morning, but in the morning we put it off until we have some free time in the afternoon, and in the afternoon we put it off until next week. Then you know the beast of procrastination has cunningly sneaked up and attacked you.
It could be that we are scared of doing some task or of the consequences of an action we have to do, or maybe feel intimidated by the person we have to call. It could even be that the task we are procrastinating over is just uninteresting or tedious.
Another serious course of procrastination is when we have other jobs that we habitually or systematically give time to first. Some of you will have a printed or mental check list and each day or week you work your way through this list. If there are, and there nearly always are, too many items on this list the ones at the end of the list get left, day after week as each time you come back to work you start at the top of the list again.
So what can we do to overcome procrastination?
Defeating procrastination is easier than at first might be believed, but it will not roll over and die while you take a coffee break. To defeat procrastination you will need to take positive steps to cut this beast down to size and then to put it out of its misery.
How can we cut it down to size?
Many of us procrastinate because the task is too big or to hard to face, so cut it down. My family and I tend to live in large houses and cutting the lawns at one of them would take up to 5½ hours. I love mowing! The smell of cut grass and a petrol mower just epitomise summer to me, but I could not face 5½ hours of lawn mowing. I loved mowing our front lawn, and so that was where I used to start. Once that was looking good, it was not so hard to start on the next lawn, often I would spend three or more hours mowing out in the sun, but I had to break it down into smaller more manageable tasks to get started.
What ever your procrastination tasks, if it is too big to swallow in one go, cut it into smaller amounts. You can't fit a whole box of chocolates into your mouth in one go, but over an evening, just one at a time and they are all gone, too soon.
If the task is very big and does not easily or obviously have a number of bite size steps to it, try to approximately halve the task. Then, if the first half is still more than you can face, halve it again. Keep repeating this process until you have one manageable task.
Suppose you have to plan the teaching that you are going to give over a two day conference. Fifteen hours of teaching is more than anyone can get their mind around. So cut it in half
Things to do:
Plan next weekends conference
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Still a whole day is too much, cut it in half
Things to do:
Plan next weekends conference
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Planning a mornings teaching is much more manageable, but we can go on
Things to do:
Plan next weekends conference
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Now planning a single training sessions is not very hard. You can always break this down if you want dividing it into more than just two halves. Some things will naturally fit into three or more sessions, so use what fits best. And if nothing fits go back to cutting it roughly in half.
Things to do:
Plan session one
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Welcome
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Introduction
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Point one
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Point two
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Point three
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Application
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Conclusion |
So session one is complete. Now we work on session two.
When we have finished session two you will find that we have already finished the morning!
Things to do:
Plan next weekends conference
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Now we move on to the Afternoon, but… What will we do all afternoon? Let's break it down again
Things to do:
Plan next weekends conference
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Day one
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Morning
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Afternoon
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Session three
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Session four
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Day two |
Even as you are writing this you decide that session four needs to be different. Let's give them time to work on something in groups. Gosh session four is gone in almost seconds and you know the subject for session three, it has to be the foundation for session four so now you will work on that.
Things to do:
Plan next weekends conference
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Day one
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Morning
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Afternoon
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Session three
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Session four
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Day two |
By the time you have finished session three, not only do you find that the afternoon is finished, but the whole of the first day is done. Tomorrow you can start to work on day two. But already on the train home from work you are beginning to think about it. The freedom of the success of finishing Day one, the power of breaking it down into manageable bite size sections, has taken the fear away and will let your mind work on it, where as before it was so scary that you would not let your mind even think about it. So now by the time you get home you know that the last session of the day will have to be a conclusion and wrap up session and you want to open the day with the new product that you are launching in the spring and most of it is just falling together. But if it isn't, you know how to cut it up into manageable sessions.
Give me five
Some jobs will never be fun. Some things you will hate however you cut them up, plan them out or dress them up. But no matter how bad the job, no matter how unpleasant the task, you can work on it for 5 minutes. For this you will need a timer with an alarm. You can use your watch or a kitchen timer, but it must count down with an alarm. If you are working in an office it must have a quiet alarm as it will be going off a lot. I use an alarm called Cool Timer that is available as a free download and has a customisable alarm.
Now, list your tasks on a piece of paper just as you might normally, but instead of putting one tick box at the end of the task, put five. Now set your timer for 5 minutes and start it counting down. You have five minutes to work on your first task. As soon as the alarm goes off, put a tick or a cross in the first box next to first task, straight away reset and restart the timer. Within 30 minutes you have made a start on each of six tasks.
You may at this point want to pop to the toilet, make a coffee or stretch your legs, but do not take more than five minutes! If you are working at a desk or on a computer it is a good idea to give your eyes some exercise too. Look out of the window or to something at as great a distance as you can and then back to something close to. Repeat this a few times.
Now straight back to the timer, but this time start it at 10 minutes. Work through your list of tasks as before. This time some of your tasks will be completed. Reward yourself by ticking the whole task out or by ticking all the boxes. When you have reached the bottom of the list again take a short break. And back to the timer. This time you may want to set it for 15 or 20 minutes. As the times get longer the list of tacks unfinished will shorten.
Working in this way has a number of advantages.
First it is a very powerful procrastination buster.
Secondly, it will often boost your productivity. You may think that working at tasks in such a fragmented way would disrupt the flow, and this may be true with some tasks. You be the judge of when to use it. However for most tasks it brings into play the great power of the deadline. The nearer you get to the alarm going off the faster you will work and the less likely you are to relax and take it easy for a moment or two, or three or…
Success Matters in your work, life and leisure. May God richly bless you.
Andrew Drapper's mission is to help ordinary people achieve extraordinary things.
Learn how to be a success in almost anything, in five easy steps, visit www.success-matters.com |
