Chris Brogan Newsletter

Emigrate from a Nation

It's time for you to fill out a few forms, pack your bags, and hug the neighbors, because you're leaving. It's time to escape the nation of Procrasti. And I have some ways to help.

Procrastination comes from a lot of sources, some of them, not as obvious as others. For one, you might be procrastinating because you've said yes to too many things (this happens to me a lot). You might be procrastinating because you don't clearly understand the directions. These are some situational reasons for procrastination. Let's walk through a simple system to help curb procrastination.

Procrastination Eliminators:

* Limit Glass Time - This includes TVs, game platforms, laptops, cell phones, and anything with a screen. I include computers from the recreational side. A half hour of Farmville can easily be turned into a half hour of quality business activity or networking.

* Limit Switching Costs - It's hard when you multitask. For short bursts of time, cut off Twitter, your Inbox, Facebook, and everything else that will distract you.

* Stop Saying Yes - The more you can say no, the more time you have to be excellent at what you're doing. (I have to work very hard on this).

* Align Constantly - Ask yourself this question ALL the time: "Is this helpful to my goals?" This goes a long way towards killing procrastination.

Procrastination Fixers:

Note: if you take more than 30 minutes on the following, you're probably procrastinating.

Step 1: Define what needs doing. Without knowing all that's on your plate, you don't know what you're procrastinating on, do you? Write a very quick/simple list. There are a million ways to do this. Don't obsess over HOW, because that is also procrastinating. Write out the list of what needs doing by when.

If you want a way to declutter your lists, check out Leo Babauta's book, The Power of Less. (affiliate link).

Step 2: Define which are most important, which are urgent. The best system I've ever seen for this is David Allen's Getting Things Done. (affiliate link) I am absolutely the worst at using this system. It doesn't work for me, or I'm too multi-threaded to better make use of the system. Just the same, without some level of prioritizing, you won't get to the things that matter.

Step 3: Quilt your time. There are two ways we find time. One is by scheduling blocks to do work. The other is by quilting. I first wrote about this http://www.chrisbrogan.com/time-quilters/ in 2006. Essentially, stuff things you have to do into the little pockets of time where you can find them.

Step 4: Execute in small bites. It's so much more rewarding to accomplish tasks. If you can, break every task into small bites and get some done every once in a while. (This is from David Allen's "next action" ideas in GTD).

Step 5: Take breaks. I know this seems like the worst advice for a procrastinator, but if you know that you've scheduled breaks every 20 minutes or every 40 minutes, then any task becomes easier to do. How hard is it to do pretty much anything for 20 minutes?

Step 6: Reward your success. If you don't praise and reward yourself for your hard work, there's no internal value and that means you won't likely do more of that. Make sense?

This isn't the end-all of how to manage procrastination, but then again, you don't have time to read too much more. Get the nuggets, absorb them, try them out, and see what you can incorporate.

For the rest of the newsletter, go here: CB Newsletter