Improve Your Time Management: Overcoming Procrastination
When you just can’t bring yourself to start something you actually should do, you are procrastinating. We often procrastinate almost unnoticeable. The result is that you end up doing some easier but completely irrelevant task, like checking your email or going to Facebook for the third time during the same hour, which is not good for your time management. This article will discuss some tips that might be useful when you catch yourself procrastinating.
The reasons for procrastination are often unconscious. They include perfectionism, distractions, fear of failure, and fear of success. In addition there exists a number of other reasons too, as we are all different. Successful procrastinators also often suffer from a combination of causes. Therefore, I think it is more valuable to focus on the solutions, at which we will take a glimpse on below.
At Time Management Solutions, we have listed some common suggestions for overcoming procrastination. We have also divided them into two groups: fast solutions and preventive solutions. This article focuses on fast solutions.
Fast solutions to procrastination are things you can do when you catch yourself procrastinating. Two examples of fast solutions are 1) lowering your own demands, and 2) working only for a fixed period of time.
Lowering our own demands is something worth thinking about every now and then. This is true especially if you catch yourself imagining that the outcome of your work should always be something exclusively superb. Well, guess what? In most cases it does not have to be.
What the perfectionists don’t often realize is that everything doesn’t need to be perfect. After all, if I remember correctly what was thought in engineering classes, quality is essentially about conformation to specifications. Well, how does this help? This realization is important, because it now gives you the freedom to choose the battlegrounds into which you go with 100% effort. These are probably the time you really want to impress, like when you are preparing a presentation for your boss, or writing that critical CV for your dream job. Generally, you should not hesitate emailing.
A second very effective tip is to restrict the time you allow yourself to work on a task. This approach is promoted in the book “The Now Habit” by Dr. Neil Fiore. It requires that you choose a period, often between 10 and 40 minutes, and just start working on the task. When the time is over you have to take a break.
The beauty with this trick is that you are immediately freed, even before you actually have started. You are liberated, because you know that in 20 minutes (or whatever interval you have chosen) you will be free to take a break and do something refreshing. When the focus shifts from completing a task to starting a it, the completion will inevitably follow. If you, on the other hand, are having a mindset that states, that you should sit down and stay working and focused on one single task until it is ready, you may even feel imprisoned, a thus you also welcome procrastination. Furthermore, we have this: once you really get started, you will notice that you might even enjoy the task, and the subsequent intervals may even feel pleasant. Now, who would have thought that!
If you are a perfectionist, don’t always be. I will discuss preventive solutions in a separate article. Mastering a few fast solutions like the ones above, together with some preventive measures, could potentially help you a lot at managing time.
Harri Jussila is associated with Time Management Solutions, an on-line resource for time management and personal productivity. http://www.time-management-solutions.com
Tags: Education, motivation, personal organization, personal productivity, productivity, self help, self improvement, Time Management, work-life balance