Somewhere long ago I heard the saying “Don’t Put Off to Tomorrow What You Can Do Today”. The very successful Nike slogan “Just Do It” which really has little to do with sports gear, also comes to mind when I think about procrastination. Procrastination, the art of putting things off – it can be a big hurdle to overcome when you are running your own business. We put things off because they’ll take too long to complete, they’re too boring, we can’t face them, everything else seems more important or we simply don’t have time. Eventually the “things I put off” mountain becomes so physically or emotionally huge that it seems insurmountable.
Each of us has a list of typical things we’d rather put off for another time – for me, it includes the BAS statement and bookkeeping, filing, deleting emails, cleaning and clearing office clutter and composing follow up emails. On the other hand I am always happy to, for example, write an article, make a phone call, do some research, attend an event, read or creatively plan. And working for myself on a limited budget means I don’t have the luxury of delegating all the ‘things I put off’. So, this month I am tackling that mountain with a series of simple steps designed to conquer my fear of procrastination heights. Join me if you like.
- Set aside 20 minutes per day for a task I’m not interested in doing, and just do it
- Choose five of those ‘just do it’ tasks for each of the five working days
- Write the ‘just do it’ tasks down in my diary for the satisfaction of crossing them off
- Use a timer to make sure I use all of those 20 minutes to start scaling the mountain
- Create a system for tackling the ‘just do it’ tasks so that one day when I can delegate them, someone else will just do it.
Sounds simple enough, so I’m beginning it now.
