I discovered this great quote by Olin Miller:
"If you want to make an easy job seem mighty hard just keep putting off doing it."You see, just about every night I solve cryptogram puzzles. Yes, as if I haven’t already had enough mind-bending tasks to attend to during the day, but it’s how I relax before retiring for the night.
Have You Ever Procrastinated?
Well if you’re human of course you have! The question to ask is, “Why do we procrastinate?” Could it be something to do with the fear of failure? Highly likely. So what better way to ward off the pain of failure than to avoid doing it in the first place?
Another reason why we procrastinate is that we are probably overwhelmed with things that need to be started, or finished. That is why we have “to-do” lists. To make it easier on yourself, try categorizing the lists and rank them according to their importance.
Another way to keep track of stuff that needs doing is to have a whiteboard. A whiteboard is great—you can keep it up-to-date easily because it’s just in one place and highly visible.
No more having scraps of paper all over your office desk and trying to keep track of them.
To be honest I still have post-it notes that seem to multiply on their own overnight.
Misty Watercolor Memories
Whether your memories are vivid abstract pieces of art or light watercolor pieces, realize that we all work from harbored memories. We relive them daily. Our job is to replace the old inferior memories that hold us back, and in their place create new memories. We can bring back these new memories into our consciousness—with pleasure, instead of fear—the next time.
I talk about memories because it is another reason for procrastination. Knowing that we have a certain unpleasant task ahead of us—one we have done before—brings up issues. It’s only natural that we would want to put off doing it if the thought of it makes our skin crawl.
How To Solve Procrastination
There are a few ways to solve procrastination and that is to have lists, as mentioned earlier, and work your way through them, or simply get someone else to do the task at hand. By that I mean hire a professional who will probably do the job better, faster, and with a better attitude!
Check out people on Fiverr because the task you hate could be a task that someone else absolutely loves to do!
Time Is Money—Your Money
If you’re sitting there thinking, “I can’t afford to hire people!”, take stock of how long it took you to do the task that you hate doing, or are not good at doing. Take the hourly rate that you charge, multiply that by how long it took you to do the job, and there you will see just how much money you are wasting by doing a job yourself that you hate! Again, you will probably find someone on Fiverr to do it for half the price because it’s something they enjoy doing and is in their zone of genius.
To be honest I think procrastination is just a lack of setting proper goals. I know a lot about that because I was a very poor goal-setter. Why was I a poor goal-setter? Because deep down I thought I would never achieve the goal so what’s the point in doing anything about it? I know differently now.
Thanks for reading!
