Procrastination?
Let's do something about it -
Tomorrow
Introduction
Have you ever heard a little voice inside saying 'yes, I will do that. But not now - later.' Yet there's no time on the clock called 'later.' Nor is there such a day on the calendar. So later never comes and we just don't get round to doing it. We're full of good intentions, but somehow it never happens. My mother used to say 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions.' Wise woman, my mother. So how do we get ourselves to do what we say we'll do? How do we stop ourselves from procrastinating?
The participants in a seminar were asked: 'What would you do with the money if you were given R86 400 every day to spend for the rest of your life?' The answers came really quickly to start with, but then started to fade when people had named their current desires. She generated a few more when she added, 'Now let me tell you a little more. Your bank account is topped up to R86 400 at midnight every night. So even if you don't spend the money, you still have the same amount each day.'
Then we started trying to find ways round the problem of not getting the maximum when we hadn't spent it all. She then asked 'How many of you would start just wasting the money?' Nobody said yes. 'How many, even when you realised you had wasted some one day, would continue to waste it every day.' Again nobody said yes.
She concluded, 'Yet this story is true, you are given 86 400 to spend every day. And it's replenished at mid-night. It's just that it isn't rands - you're given seconds instead.'
We then began to realise that time has value - real value. Some even say time is money. We're given 86 400 seconds each day, and we can't save any for tomorrow. How much time do we use wisely? How much do we just squander? To stop ourselves procrastinating we first need to see time as valuable.
Reward Yourself.
When we have a task to perform, break it down into more manageable chunks. Make a commitment to doing the next chunk by a certain time. Reward yourselves for completing it. Perhaps this is your motivator; 'I'm going to do this task by this evening, and then I'll watch my favourite program.' The motivation is that if it's not done by the time the program is shown, then we don't allow ourselves to watch it.
'Cruel' you say. No, just effective. You'll only miss your favourite program only once. Next time you'll ensure that the task is completed by your self-imposed deadline. And, anyway, you can always use the VCR to record the episode so that you can watch it when you've completed the task.
This works whether you have pleasant or unpleasant tasks to do. Do the unpleasant ones first. The reward can be anything you enjoy, including another task. Reward yourself with the pleasant task only once you've completed the unpleasant ones. Make the reward commensurate with the size of the task. On the day you go to the gym for the first time, you can have a second helping of desert, but don't indulge your habit, don't eat a litre of your favourite ice-cream! If the achievement took ages, and really is monumental, then you can choose a really large reward, you can enjoy the 'litre'.
Keep your Promises to Yourself.
This is effective deadline setting at its best. Yet it relies upon you keeping your word - to yourself. And if you don't keep your own word to yourself, there's no power in your word. The muscle of your word will be weakened and you'll have even less power to create. Your word will have no power.
So let's be careful what we promise. Take promises very seriously, because we lose much personal power when we break our commitments. Especially those we make to ourselves. We need to know that we are worth keeping our promises. That's the way to create extraordinary results.
Do what's Important First.
Sometimes the problem is that we haven't decided what is important to us, or what isn't. Too often we spend our time doing what's urgent. Urgent is not necessarily important. What's important and urgent to us may not be so for another. Yet we define ourselves by the choices we make.
Which would be the more profitable use of our time? The urgent, which may not necessarily be important? Or the important which is not urgent. How often do we spend our time, and our money, on what is neither? Does its urgency say anything about how important it is? And how do we tell what is important anyway? We suggest you use a very simple definition: 'If it will or could make a significant difference to your life in five years time, then it's important - and if it won't, it's not important.' Notice this says nothing about whether it's urgent or not.
Is your life developing in the way you really want? Have the past five years seen the big improvement you really would have liked in your wildest dreams? If not, perhaps it's because you haven't yet decided exactly what is important for you. Many of us spend our lives doing the urgent, because we haven't put in the time and effort to decide what's important to us. It's not too late, but if we do not decide what's important for us, then how likely is it to ever happen?
So What Is Important To You?
For example. Will it make a real difference in five years time if you have a meal out rather than at home, or you even miss a meal? Almost certainly not. Or if you only get six instead of seven hours sleep tonight? Almost certainly not.
But will it or could it make a significant difference in five years time if we ignore that warning sound from the car when it's overdue for a service? Will it make a difference if we program our subconscious mind with our vision last thing at night, or buy and study 'Rich Dad, Poor Dad' by Robert Kiyosaki? Yes, of course it will make a difference. We need to invest more time and money in the important - in what will or could make a significant difference in five years time.
The Four Quadrants
The Four Quadrants, as taught in the What Matters Most™ course by the Franklin Covey organization, are very valuable here. They are:
Our presenter, Gerrit Cloete, expanded on the regular material with the results of a survey asking companies what proportion of their time they spent in the four quadrants. The survey split the answers between the average companies and the high-performance ones. Where each type of company spend their time makes fascinating reading
We see that Quadrant II and Quadrant III are more or less reversed in these two tables. By the time they spend in the different Quadrants, we see that average companies first ask what's urgent, and then do what's important among the urgent. In contrast, high performance companies first ask is it important, and then do what's urgent among the important.
So if you want high performance rather than average results, then model your company or your life on the high performers. First ask is it important, and then among what's important, do the urgent first, then the not urgent and thirdly the urgent but not important. Forget about what's neither important nor urgent.
Decide what's important to you - create an inspiring vision for your future. Of course, the above assumes that we've already decided what we really want in our lives - that we've created an inspiring vision for our future. Decide on an inspiring, long-term, written, unrealistic, five-years out, up to date vision for our future. Unrealistic? Should our vision really be unrealistic? Yet, if it's realistic, then this suggests that it's achievable with what we know now. Does realistic really mean more-of-the-same? Is more of the same what we really want?
Do you need some help to create an inspiring vision for your future?
- Try writing your Four Mondays Vision.
- Use The Four Mondays Vision To Create The Changes You Want
- Use the four steps below to assist you to create the changes that you want.
- Invest some time in your future.
- DON'T PROCRASTINATE!
- Complete each of the following on a separate sheet of paper.
- Give as much detail as possible.
1. Write down, in detail, a typical working day in your life today. How do you spend most Mondays? Is this perhaps some variation of: get up in the morning, go to work, make some phone calls, push some paper around, meet some people. Then have lunch, make some more phone calls, push some more paper around, meet some more people. Come home, do what you do in the evening, have supper, maybe some TV and go to bed.
2. Then write down, in detail, a typical working day in your life 5 years ago. How were your Mondays then?
3. Then write down a typical working day in your life in 5 years time if you keep doing what you're doing now.
4. Then write down a typical Monday in your life in 5 years time when you're free. When you've invested the effort to become free. How will you spend your time and money? What inspires you? Who will go with you on your next trip overseas? Where was your last trip? What do you want to do and have? Why? What do you want to be? Keep your dreams private, even from your partner for now.
We need dreams to inspire us. For at least a month, make no changes at all in your life. For now, start nothing new, end nothing. First we need to write down an inspiring vision for your future - your desired life-style, only then can we create a viable strategy to achieve it.
Now if you don't have an inspiring vision for your future, then this will help you create one. And either you'll do this or you won't. And if you don't do it, then that's not wrong, it's just that you're choosing differently. And all our decisions have consequences. Some choices lead us towards designing our lives, and some don't. Some give us our current life and some give us a life of abundance and meaning. Which do you choose?
How to create your inspiring, unrealistic, long-term vision for your future and then work out what to do tomorrow.
1 Decide what you really want - if you haven't already done so. Write down your inspiring, unrealistic fourth Monday vision. If this does not really inspire you, then keep adding inspiring, unrealistic dreams to your fourth Monday vision until your total vision does inspire you.
2 Envision yourself, in the future, as having just achieved that vision. You're now there, and the question is 'What did I do to get here? How did I achieve this?' Answer this question.
3 You now have an intermediate step, which is on the path to get to your vision. If you don't exactly how to achieve this, then go back to paragraph two, this time using this intermediate step as your starting vision. Keep going round this loop, until you have an intermediate step which you already know how to achieve. When you know exactly how to achieve this step, then you also know what is important to you. Move to paragraph four.
4 You now know exactly how to achieve this smallest intermediate step to creating your inspiring vision. So this is an achievable dream. A goal is a dream for our future, which has a reasonable plan to get there and an realistic deadline for its achievement. We know how to achieve this dream so we can set a goal to do so.
5 Set the goal(s) to achieve this. Continue to chunk this goal down, if necessary, until we have some short term and longer term goals to achieve this dream. These are unlikely to be urgent, but they are important. Our vision inspires us, and we need to work on these intermediate goals to achieve this vision. Then just do it.
Example: Turning your unrealistic Vision into a realistic Goal
We need clarity about our unrealistic - possibly totally unreasonable - vision for our future. Then we can work backwards. Suppose we have an unrealistic vision. Let's suppose we want to create peace between all nations in the world....
Start by visualising the future; see yourself as the head of the team which has just successfully negotiated the end to the very last conflict between nations in the world. You've just created world peace! See yourself at the celebration dinner, hear yourself receiving the congratulations of everyone there, feel the warmth of their approval, and then ask yourself 'how did I achieve this?' Your answer perhaps would be 'I joined the United Nations as a top negotiator ten years ago and did a wonderful job.'
So your next vision is ten years earlier; envision yourself as having just joined the United Nations as a top negotiator. See yourself receiving congratulations at the United Nations celebration in New York honouring your appointment, and again ask yourself 'how did I get here?' The answer might be 'I got this appointment after making a name for myself in private industry as a top international negotiator over the past ten years.'
So again your next vision is ten years earlier; now envision yourself as having just joined a specialist international negotiating consultancy. See yourself receiving the congratulations of your fellow staff members, and again ask yourself 'how did I get here?' The answer could perhaps be 'I joined a specialist negotiating company in South Africa five years ago and made a real name for myself.'
So your vision is now five years earlier; see yourself as having just joined this company in South Africa. Again see yourself receiving the congratulations of your fellow staff members, and again ask yourself 'how did I get here?' The answer might be 'I got a top class degree which enabled me to specialise in conflict resolution and land this wonderful job as a negotiator.'
This then gives you a realistic goal - to get a top class degree oriented towards conflict resolution - from your unrealistic vision. And then you can work out what steps to take now to achieve this realistic goal and what timeframe to give it.
And your shorter term goal is to investigate the field, find out which degrees would best qualify you and which Universities would best position you for a career in conflict resolution. Your vision inspires you, and this will help you towards it. You now have some phone calls to put on your action list for tomorrow. These calls are not urgent, but you know they are important!
Summary.
So let's get on with it. First create an inspiring vision for your future. Then look at what you're planning to do and decide 'is it Important?' before asking 'is it Urgent?' Then chunk it down, set yourself a deadline for its completion and choose, in advance, how you will reward yourself when it's done. And keep all promises faithfully, especially ones to yourself. In fact, never break a promise. And remember, never say never!
For more information please contact the author Cris Baker via the Contact Us link below, or through the Life Strategies web-site.