The Now Habit
Productivity Engineering
Mental Toughness
Do It Now
Getting Things Done
(Personally tested and recommended by the author of this web. Some links might lead to other websites.)
S'up? - I just read an article online before arriving at this site entitled: "The Problem of Procrastination" and I must say there were a lot of helpful insights in it. Under the 'type of procrastinator' list, I recognized myself in several of the descriptions. One I think has to do with fear: the fear of not doing something is not as great as the fear of doing something that we're somehow conflicted about. A for instance is I'm a singer that finally got around to making a demo (after a few years of procrastination I might add), got some photos, and now in the final stages is taking forever to finish the printing, burning CD stages. I distract myself by going shopping, make excuses that I don't have the money, etc. etc. when basically - it's some sort of fear of success. It's weird. The other thing that was interesting in that article is that there are three catagories of tasks: urgent/priority; non-urgent/priority; and urgent/non-priority. Of course there is non-urgent/non-priority, but to a procrastinator that's so far off the map it doesn't even heed an honerable mention. My toughest is the non-urgent/priority. Things that if I did them would probably have the biggest impact on my long term happiness. Any thoughts? - a time line perhaps of smaller, dated steps maybe.... but then again I'm the queen of charts and lists, again it's a distraction from the "doing". Ah well, there's always hope... Aivey
Comments
I know many people
I know many people distinguish tasks by urgency and priority, but I don't.
I have just tasks that I decided to go for, and keep that list as small as possible.
Than I have a list of someday/maybe, some of those will make it to my main list, but not all, and first of all, they are not pressing on me nor taking away my attention and powers by eating out my conscience as another "not done for months" task. They are away of my sight, and on regular reviews, will either make it or not, to the top list.
Smaller and dated steps? Definitely.
If you didn't learnt about the idea of next actions as defined by David Allen, do some research on that. Because it seems converting your tasks to next actions, would help you mightily.