Stop Procrastination and Get More Done - A Simple Technique That Will Improve Your Productivity
There is nothing worse than having something to do and putting it off until the last minute.
Usually what happens is what you thought was going to be easy, winds up being a lot harder than it should have been.
Next thing you know, you are scrambling around trying to get everything done last minute and it turns out horribly.
I think we all know this is a little thing called procrastination.
It's not always pretty, and a ton of us do it, but here is a technique that I have been using with great success.
I will admit that I used to be a chronic procrastinator.
I was the guy who would leave all my school projects until the last minute and wind up staying up all night to get them done.
I used to wait until the last minute to mail out cards and hope that they got their on time.
I used to wait until the dog had eaten every single piece of his food until I went and got more.
All of these things could have been easily taken care of ahead of time so I wouldn't have had to run around and do them last minute.
Chronic procrastinator..
...
that was me.
But I stumbled across a method that has really turned things around for me.
Truth is, it's really not that hard to change your habits as I thought it would be.
So here's what I did.
Depending on what the project was, I set a bunch of goals.
Now these are goals as in "I will have this done by this date".
Not a whole lot of detail at this point just yet.
Once I had my goals in place, I then wrote myself out daily tasks to do so I would know exactly what I needed to do each day to reach my end goal.
I then broke those daily tasks down into certain times that I would get them done.
The biggest thing I did was work with a timer.
This allowed me to know exactly the amount of time I had to focus on each particular task.
I just set the timer and for that amount of time I worked on what ever it was I needed to.
When the timer went off, I stopped.
This allowed me to take focus to a whole different level.
Because I new that for a certain amount of time I was going to do nothing but work on one thing, it was amazing how much more focused I was.
I didn't want to procrastinate because I was looking at the project in baby steps instead of the whole tasks itself.
Working with the timer just made everything so much easier.
Usually what happens is what you thought was going to be easy, winds up being a lot harder than it should have been.
Next thing you know, you are scrambling around trying to get everything done last minute and it turns out horribly.
I think we all know this is a little thing called procrastination.
It's not always pretty, and a ton of us do it, but here is a technique that I have been using with great success.
I will admit that I used to be a chronic procrastinator.
I was the guy who would leave all my school projects until the last minute and wind up staying up all night to get them done.
I used to wait until the last minute to mail out cards and hope that they got their on time.
I used to wait until the dog had eaten every single piece of his food until I went and got more.
All of these things could have been easily taken care of ahead of time so I wouldn't have had to run around and do them last minute.
Chronic procrastinator..
...
that was me.
But I stumbled across a method that has really turned things around for me.
Truth is, it's really not that hard to change your habits as I thought it would be.
So here's what I did.
Depending on what the project was, I set a bunch of goals.
Now these are goals as in "I will have this done by this date".
Not a whole lot of detail at this point just yet.
Once I had my goals in place, I then wrote myself out daily tasks to do so I would know exactly what I needed to do each day to reach my end goal.
I then broke those daily tasks down into certain times that I would get them done.
The biggest thing I did was work with a timer.
This allowed me to know exactly the amount of time I had to focus on each particular task.
I just set the timer and for that amount of time I worked on what ever it was I needed to.
When the timer went off, I stopped.
This allowed me to take focus to a whole different level.
Because I new that for a certain amount of time I was going to do nothing but work on one thing, it was amazing how much more focused I was.
I didn't want to procrastinate because I was looking at the project in baby steps instead of the whole tasks itself.
Working with the timer just made everything so much easier.
Source...