[acb-hsp] Meeting Procrastination Head-On

[peter altschul]

Get To Work By Meeting Procrastination Head-On
  BY Kevin Purdy 04-06-2012 9:37 PM
  Being smart, energetic, and creative won't save you from 
procrastination, but knowing the whys and hows of it can be a big 
help.  Here are four things you might not know about your worst 
habit.
  There's a huge distance between the physical energy it takes to 
run on a treadmill--the muscles, calories, and breath--and the 
often larger emotional energy it takes to head to the gym after a 
stressful day.  Just ask a guy who gained 40 pounds during 
graduate school.
  Rory Vaden is now much more trim, and quite focused on 
evangelizing the power of self-discipline in books like Take the 
Stairs: 7 Steps to Achieving True Success.  But back in graduate 
school, it wasn't really laziness that kept Vaden him from the 
gym, but self-criticism.
  "The number one reason we procrastinate is, we don't believe we 
have what it takes to pull it off," Vaden said in an interview.  
"You think, `I probably don't have the willpower to see this all 
the way through.`" You don't necessarily say this exact line to 
yourself, though--you create a bunch of things in your head to do 
instead, even if, in the end, you don't really do them.
  Knowing and acknowledging when you're actually procrastinating, 
and knowing what's likely to trigger it, is probably your best 
defense against the monster that makes you feel busy without 
feeling productive.  Here's a few thoughts on acknowledging your 
misspent moments and not letting it bring you down, from Vaden 
and other brutally honest sources.
  Clutter is procrastination, so deal with it
  Your inbox can be empty, your to-do list entirely reasonable, 
but clutter gives away your latent procrastination.  Whether it's 
actual papers and books everywhere you look around your 
workspace, or a browser stuffed with check-this-out bookmarks, 
clutter accumulates because "you've deferred making a decision 
about what to do with it," writes Maura Nevel Thomas in Personal 
Productivity Secrets due out May 1.  "Maybe you think making a 
decision is going to take more time than you have to devote, or 
you're afraid you might need it later, or perhaps you just don't 
feel like dealing with it."
  Thomas' book recommends some techniques that should be familiar 
to anyone whobs looked into the Getting Things Done system 
including the "two-minute rule": whatever you can process or deal 
with in two minutes, do it as soon as it pops up.  But the real 
solution to procrastinating your cleanliness comes from actually 
wanting to deal with all that useless paper and unwanted emails 
and the like.
  Messing with your tools is slick self-delusion
  "It's easy to always be getting ready to get ready." That's how 
Vaden summarizes one of his key concepts around procrastination, 
"Creative Avoidance." Rather than do the things that seem far 
more emotionally draining than they are actually, physically 
demanding, we talk about projects with people, or mess with the 
tools we have to do them--find the right add-on, tweak the 
settings, add more contacts to LinkedIn.  In other words, we 
avoid necessary, intimidating things, and busywork rushes in, 
like that lesson you still remember about gases from high school 
chemistry.
  "The amount of busywork always expands to fill whatever 
attention we allow to be available," Vaden said.  "You have to 
cultivate the habit of action ...  by demanding to yourself that 
you make progress, but freeing yourself from the demand for 
perfection.  People wait to start until they have the perfect 
amount of time, the perfect set of resources, the perfect timing, 
but it never comes.  You have to want to make progress."
  Do the heavy stuff earlier
  If procrastination is the art of avoiding decisions in favor of 
something, anything else, then you should know how decision after 
decision saps your willpower.  So if you need to clear out a 
whole bunch of messages, items on your desk, or other nuggets 
requiring your snap judgement, do them early in the morning, or 
after you've had a good bit of rest from the other pressures of 
your work.
  Be honest with yourself about the actual effort involved in 
doing your tasks, but be realistic about needing to space them 
out.
  "Priority Dilution" is something even the boss' favorite 
suffers from.
  Why do email inboxes always sort themselves in reverse 
chronological order? And why do you answer your emails that way? 
It's because itbs easy to fall victim to the latest and loudest 
stuff, and because it feels great to dash off responses and knock 
messages down.  It's "incredible work, but that doesn't mean it's 
effective," Vaden said.
  That's the easiest example of what Vaden calls "Priority 
Dilution," a kind of unconscious procrastination (as opposed to 
conscious procrastination, which is, basically, choosing what you 
want to do).  It's why even after you label something as a High 
Priority, put a flag on it, and color it red, you don't get it 
done, because you keep waiting for the right time to do it.
  "Managers and high-performing employees suffer from this a lot, 
almost more than anyone," Vaden said.  "We know which things are 
important, but we feel they need to rise to a level of 
convenience."
  "But on any day, you can schedule things, move things so you've 
got 30 minutes available.  Now that you've got those 30 minutes, 
you can ignore the small stuff while you work on the big stuff.  
Just as important, capture the small stuff that comes in while 
you're working on the big stuff."
  Copyright B) 2012 Mansueto Ventures LLC.  All rights reserved.