Summary – 5 things you must procrastinate

We’ve all heard that procrastination is the one enemy of productivity. In fact I myself have written a few articles on combatting procrastination.

• Procrastinator United
• Mathematical Formula to Motivate You Finish Up Work
• 5 Sure Way To A Stronger Willpower

However, procrastination is not all that bad. There are a few unique cases that we should consider procrastination as an option. In most of the case, it is by far the best option.

Allow me to name a few of those cases where procrastination should be practised.

1) Procrastinate Spending Money
Another word for spending money is of course shopping. Just procrastinate it all together. Everytime you have the urge to do shopping just for the sake of killing time. Procrastinate it. Just say “I will do this later, not now”. If that doesn’t work, repeat this “You hear me?? LATER!!” 🙂

But first you must know the difference between fundamental things and leasure things. You don’t want to mix the two, if not you will buy that extra pair of pants when you are actually going to buy some food.

2) Procrastinate Agreeing to Unbelievably Good Deals
How often you have just received your paycheck when suddenly a well dressed man approaches you offering the best massage chair in the world. The way he describes the amazing feature of the massage chair is so convincing that you are preparing to surrender all your money to him smilingly.

No offense to all the sales person reading, salesman are really good at this. You are not even thinking of a chair when you walk out of the bank, but suddenly you just can’t stop thinking about the deal.

Rule of thumb when approached by sales person, if you don’t need it 5 minutes ago, you probably don’t need it now. Procrastinate the decision to sometime later in the future.

3) Procrastinate Deciding On Non-Urgent Matter
Non urgent matter are decision that need to be made but you still have time to think about it. For examples, the name of your future children, or where to invest your hard earned money.

You don’t need to decide now. You still have a lot of time to think of a good name or doing research on your investment option. Yes, you may be a little late, but you are giving yourself the chance to be better equipped.

Please notice the keyword “Equipped”. There’s no point of procrastinating decision making, if you just end up NOT any wiser on the subject.

4) Procrastinate Unstable Emotion
How to procrastinate your emotion? Not easy, that much I can tell you, but not impossible.

When you are depressed, just say this out loud. “I can’t do this now. I’ll have to suck it up and deal with this emotion later”. Difficult to do? believe me it is doable. I personally am always stressed out at work, but when I get home. I just postpone the stress to tomorrow, when I can actually do something about it.

Why bother panicking about work not finished when you are at home. There’s no way you can finish your work at home since the work is at the office. So worry about it tomorrow.

You think this is difficult? Wait till you read no 5. Oh wait, here it is.

5) Procrastinate “Procrastination Activity”
When you are supposed to clean up the house, and you think about doing it later. What do you end up doing?

This is procrastination activity. Things like watching television, playing games or taking unnecessary nap. How about procrastinating this as a change? Number 4 doesn’t seem so difficult now, does it?

Conclusion – Just like anything else, procrastination on the 5 items listed above will be easier to do if you make a conscious decision to do it later. Say it out loud that you are not going to do this now.

Happy procrastinating!

– I wonder –
Is there any other unique cases that I might have missed?

Photo credit – McPig

Summary – The problem is to start

When I want to write an article here, there is always just one problem to it. It was to sit down and start.

Yesterday the mrs and I went to Tampin, about 50km from home just to browse for a thing or two. Basically just wanted to see Tampin :). Can you guess which process took the longest time? It was us getting ready to go. The journey was very smooth and we could get back with still some sunshine over our head.

It is apparent that in almost anything that we do, the most important steps is NOT researching how to do it, NOT how to do it. It’s when you are going to start. Don’t you agree?

If we can establish this as the key problem… and do something about it, I am quite confident that most of our work will be accomplished efficiently

Whenever there is work to do, just move your arm and do it. To start the work is actually the hardest thing to do. The rest will come naturally

When there is homework/assignment in front of us waiting to be done, it can only be done if we take the pen and do it. Simple… Thinking about what other activity can be done at the time will not finish the work, Reading blogs will not be helpful either.. (That’s what I’m doing most of the time hehe)

There’s a saying that “you fail to plan means that you plan to fail”. But I supposed an extension of that quote should be “but if your planning process take forever, it’s better that you fail. At least you learn something from it.”

A lengthy quote will never work. 🙂

– I wonder –
How to find the balance between planning carefully before doing a task and just start the task and plan along the way? Which do you agree?

————– Personal Note ————-
I went to Tampin to find myself and the mrs a red Baju Melayu for DaPocket’s wedding this February. However we didn’t find any… Not that we are looking very hard. We were just taking an evening drive 🙂

I just realized that the town is claimed by both state Negeri Sembilan and Melaka.

Yesterday was my day off, and I have a whole lot of plans to do, House to clean, bills to pay, Harry Potter to read. I spend almost my whole day doing 2 out of 3. I bet you know which one I ignore. Yes.. House cleaning.

I know no one is going to clean the house if not me. And I know sooner or later, I will be the one who will do it. In the end, I started cleaning my house at around 10.00pm and I’m supposed to go to bed at around 1.00 am. This is a real example of procrastination.

Basically we all know procrastination. It is when we skip one task (which is usually the most important and not fun) to do another task (which is more fun) or not doing any task at all (which is super fun hehe). And it has been illustrated in almost all self-help book on how to overcome it; the whole to-do list, prioritize etc.

I am not going to reinvent the wheel and elaborate on that. I am more interested on how we, the real people, handle it. This is what I did –

• Smaller But Frequent Rewards – After every 5 pages of Harry Potter I read, I will get up and do 2 small things; wash the dishes and take out the garbage.

• Procrastinate Consciously – Sometimes when I really hate the task, and it is not that important. I choose to procrastinate conciously. For example, I have to prepare monthly maintenance report, which is very tedious. My mind go blank already with no mood what so ever to do it. I know for sure that if I force myself doing it, the report will be badly written and I may have to do it again. In that case, I usually decide to procrastinate without any guilt, and play that damn addictive “pikacu” game my wife introduced me. Later, I found out that I am able to do the report effectively for about 15 minutes before I’m out of mood again. At least 15 minutes of work done right?

• Lie to Self – Working under pressure sometimes do give me a bit motivation to overcome procrastinate. Usually I just lie to myself saying that in 2 hours my manager will be coming for tea at my house. I repeatedly convince myself that that will happen. And then you can see I work at 110% efficiency.

I still believe procrastinate is a bad attitude to have. But it will always be there. And sometimes it wins.

So do you guys have any secret way to tackle procrastination? motivate yourself to do things you dont like?

————— Personal Note ————————–
My worst case of procrastination is when I was studying in the university. I need to submit all my reports the next day, and I still had to do 14 weekly reports all in one night. The pressure that night was so overwhelming that I even thought that this might be how people who commit suicide feels like. Not that I have that idea. I finished all the reports in time, but the lecturer failed me. That was one lesson I will remember for the rest of my life.

Summary – To-Do List equals Prioritize & Results
I’m sure everyone can agree that one of the best tools for productivity is the To-Do list. All productivity gurus recommend it. In fact, it is considered as the foundation of productivity by some. Generally, a To-Do list is a system in which you will list down all the tasks needed to be done. Once a task is completed, it will be written off from the list. It’s as simple as that.

However do you know that To-Do list can be further improved to maximize productivity? Here are 7 tricks I personally implement that you might find useful.

1) Write this sentence at the top of your To-Do list

“It is never about how many left, it is about how many accomplished”

How many times have you been so happy that you have completed a lot of the tasks listed, but by the time you are about to celebrate, another set of tasks occupy the list. If your focus everyday is to clear that list, you will be frustrated everyday.

That is why it is always better to focus on the number of tasks completed instead of number of tasks left on the list. Believe me, it will make a lot of difference in our motivation level once our perception on the concept of a To-Do list changed.

2) Keep a record (The Done List)

Based on the same philosophy, I would recommend you to keep a record of the tasks completed. Make another list if you can – The Done list. Any tasks you have written off from your To-Do list, put them in this list. This list will serve as a reminder to you that you can be productive if you want. It will also help boost that declining motivation almost immediately.

If motivation is not a problem to you, at least take pride in your work. You deserve it.

3) Set points and its corresponding rewards

This tip is actually one of my favorites. I put points to all my tasks on the To-Do list. The most urgent tasks will be given 10 points, while the less important ones will be given 5 points. The tasks which are not important are given 0 points. Yes, Zero. I will tell you why shortly.

I will then set a target and its corresponding rewards. For example, if I ever reached 5000 points, I will treat myself with a one day leave. Of course you can make this more interesting by allowing further accumulation of the points. It’s your rule.

The reason I give the least important task a zero is because I have experimented before by giving it 1 points. I end up avoiding doing all the urgent tasks and just focus on these trivia tasks. That itself is an example of a To-Do list went wrong.

4) Make it ugly

I have a friend who actually decorate her To-Do list. She actually writes with such beautiful handwriting on a beautiful piece of paper. If I’m not mistaken, it’s the kind of paper I used to write love letter on. But that’s another story. In the end, her To-Do list is not getting any shorter and she is more stressful than ever.

I have nothing against beautifully written work. But for a To-Do list, I would recommend you to write with your worst handwriting ever (Of course it must be readable too). The whole purpose of a To-Do list is to cross the items off. By making it ugly, you are subconciously pushing yourself to finish the tasks as soon as possible. Who would want to have an ugly written list unchanged for a year?

5) Use paper with lines

I once used a whiteboard as my To-Do list. It was a bad idea. Since there was no lines to separate the tasks, I often just squeezed the new task in between the existing tasks. By the end of the day, the whiteboard was filled with incomprehensible words.

Use paper with lines for your To-Do list. Nothing is more frustrating that a board full of tasks but you can’t read it.

6) Make the list short

Now that you are using paper with lines, why not limit your To-Do list further by having only 10 tasks on each paper. It is very tempting to have a very long list. But the truth is, a short list is better in term of efficiency and simplicity. Here are a few additional reasons why a short list is always better.

• Easy to scan through anytime.

• Highlight the most important task immediately.

• More satisfying when you write off a task.

• Having completed one paper of tasks will give you an extra boost of motivation.

• You are always eager to free up some space on your paper by completing the task.

A suggestion, go through your To-Do list and find tasks that can be delegated. Write that off. Now find other tasks that can just be eliminated. You should by now have reduced the length of your To-Do list by half. Congratulation!

7) Take three tasks out (Literally)

Remember your To-Do list with ten tasks? Now tear the top three tasks and immediately complete the tasks. Instead of crossing off tasks after you complete it, you are now doing it the other way around. If three tasks is too much, you can always choose just the one. It will help if the tasks torn are your most important tasks of the day.

There is only one rule to this technique. You must complete the task by all means. Once you allow yourself to procrastinate or rewrite the tasks again tomorrow, it will immediately become a habit. You don’t want that.

/end list

Conclusion

There are so many ways you can improve your To-Do list, but it will not work if you don’t understand the fundamental of a To-Do list. A To-Do list is meant to help you prioritize which tasks are more important. The list will also be useless if you avoid completing all the tasks.

– I Wonder –
Any other tricks you might want to share with the rest of the readers?

———– Personal Note ————-
My first computer got infected by virus almost monthly. I could put up with a virus that shows funny message once in a while, but this virus slowed my computer to a near halt. As a result, I formatted my computer every month. Fortunately, I had prepared a To-Do list on the steps to be taken immediately after a computer format. The list contained what softwares to install, what were the settings etc. Ah the good times.

Photo Credit – Purpleslog