4. Start with Your Most Important Tasks
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You always tend to procrastinate on large, important tasks with considerable future value. Successful completion of these major tasks can make a major difference in your life. There seems to be a universal tendency to delay working on, or completing, the most important tasks until the last moment.
Some people say that they work better under pressure. This may be true in some cases, because then, you have no time for excuses. The heat is on. The consequences of not completing the job are too serious to delay. But it is always better to have the job done well in advance of the deadline.
5. Practice Creative Procrastination
Fifth, learn to practice creative procrastination as part of your time management program. This requires that you consciously procrastinate on those tasks that contribute little or nothing to the accomplishment of your major, high-value goals. Since you can never do everything that you have to do, you are going to have to procrastinate on something. The difference between effective people and ineffective people is that effective people procrastinate on the things that don’t really matter.
On the other hand, ineffective people always procrastinate on the tasks that could make a real difference. Use your willpower and self-discipline to put off and delay doing minor, irrelevant tasks in favor of major, important tasks.
Many small jobs, left to themselves, have a tendency to become unnecessary. If you don’t do them for a while, you eventually reach a point 224
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where they don’t need to be done at all. These are the tasks that are the best candidates for creative procrastination.
Before you start on a job, ask yourself, “What would happen if this task were not done at all?” If the answer to this question is “Not much,” then put it off as long as you can. Often you won’t have to do it at all.
Sixteen Ways to Overcome Procrastination
Because procrastination is such a major concern of so many people, and has been a bugaboo for people throughout the ages, a series of ideas and methods for overcoming procrastination have been developed over the years.
Here are sixteen of the most powerful techniques ever discovered to help you to overcome procrastination in your work and personal life. Think about which one of these ideas could be most helpful to you right now, in your current situation.
1. Think on paper.
Prepare thoroughly. List every step of the job in advance. Break the job down into its constituent parts before you begin. The very act writing out every detail and thoroughly preparing in advance will help you to overcome procrastination and get started.
2. Gather all the necessary materials and work tools that you will require before you begin.
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When you sit down to work, or when you begin a task, make sure that you have everything at hand so that you won’t have to get up or move until the task is complete. Being fully prepared is a powerful motivator for staying with the task until it is finished.
3. Do one small thing to get started.
There is a 20/80 rule that says that the first 20% of the task often accounts for 80% of the value of that task.
This is probably what Confucius meant when he said that, “A journey of 1000 leagues begins with a single step.” Once you have taken even one small step to start the job, you will often find yourself continuing on with the task and through to completion.
4. Salami slice the task.
Just as you would never try to eat a whole loaf of salami at once, sometimes the best way to complete a major job is to take a small slice and complete just that piece, just as you would take a single slice of salami and eat it.
You have heard the question, “How do you eat an elephant?” The answer of course is “One bite at a time!” There is a saying that, “by the yard it’s hard, but inch by inch, anything is a cinch.”
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When you select a small piece of the task and then discipline yourself to do it and get it behind you, it will often give you the momentum you need to counter inertia and overcome procrastination.
5. Practice the Swiss cheese technique.
Just as a block of Swiss cheese is full of large holes, you treat your task like a block of cheese and you punch holes in it. Select a five-minute part of the job and do only that. Don’t worry about the whole job. Just pick a small part of the job with an identifiable amount of time required and then do that part.
For example, if you wanted to write an article or a book, you can break the task down into small pieces and do just one small piece at a time whenever you get a chance. Many authors begin by writing one page per day. If you are doing research, you can read one article per sitting. Many people write complete books on airplanes, or complete their college degrees with snatches of time between other activities. If you wrote one page per day for a year, you would have a 365-page book by the end of the year.
6. Start from the outside and complete the smaller tasks first.
Often there are preparatory steps you must take before you can tackle the main part of the job. In that case, starting from the outside and doing all the little tasks necessary will help you to overcome procrastination and get you started on the big tasks.
7. Start from the inside and do the larger tasks first.
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This is the opposite of number six. Look over your list of everything that you have to do to complete the job, and ask yourself, “What is the biggest single task on this list?”
What is the one item that will take the most time, or require the most effort?
Then discipline yourself to start with that item and stay with it until it is complete. All the other smaller tasks on the list will then seem easier by comparison.
8. Do the task that causes you the most fear or anxiety.
This usually has to do with someone else. Often it has to do with overcoming the fear of failure or rejection. In sales, it may be associated with prospecting. In management, it may be associated with disciplining or firing an employee. In relationships, this may have to do with confronting an unhappy personal situation. In every case, you will be more effective if you deal first with the item that is causing you the greatest emotional distress or fear. Often this will break the log jam in your work and free you up mentally and emotionally to complete all your other tasks.
9. Start your day with the most unpleasant task first.
Get it over with and behind you. Everything else for the rest of the day will seem easier in comparison.
A recent study compared two groups of people. One group started an exercise program in the morning. The second group started an exercise 228
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program in the evenings after work. The researchers found that the morning exercisers were much more likely to still be in the program six months later.
They found that starting the day with exercise was much more likely to lead to the habit of regular exercise than putting it off until the end of the day when it was easier to make excuses and procrastinate.
Mark Twain once wrote that, “The first thing you should do when you get up each morning is to eat a live frog; then you will have the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that can happen to you all day long.”
Your “live frog” is your biggest, most difficult, most unpleasant task. When you start and finish this task before doing anything else, you will have the satisfaction of knowing that the rest of your day is going to proceed much more smoothly.
10. Think about the negative consequences of not doing the job or completing the task.
What will happen to you if this job is not done on schedule? Both fear and desire are great motivators of human behavior. Sometimes you can motivate yourself by the desire for the benefits and rewards of task completion.
Sometimes you can motivate yourself into action by thinking about the negative consequences of not doing the job as promised.
11. Think about how you will benefit from doing the job and completing the task.
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Write down all the reasons why it would be helpful for you to get this job done on time. The more reasons you have for completing the task, the more intense will be your desire to begin, and the greater will be your internal drive to complete what you’ve started.