We’ve all been there. You come in to the office early. You scan the huge list of pending items to complete today. There’s no way you’ll be able to deliver them all on time. You say to yourself “Let me read some blogs or see what people are doing in Facebook. I’m sure I’ll get some ideas or relax to take on the monster pile.” Your co-worker taps you on the shoulder. “Wanna do lunch?”
Where did your morning go?
Sometimes it’s a habit you have formed since high school. Does the word “cramming” come to mind?
Everyone’s guilty of doing it at one time or another, but it can become a real problem that can wreck your career if you’re not careful. The danger of procrastination is that it creeps so silently you don’t even realize it’s there and that it’s growing.
So here I am to try to change all that. I can recommend this approach not only because I wrote it; I use it all the time to keep myself on track, and have seen it work on the most afflicted co-workers. Stick to these simple rules, and you’re guaranteed to see results, or your money back — figuratively speaking, of course.
You have to do the whole approach in 5 business days. You might be able to complete these sooner. Just make sure you don’t take more than a week, otherwise you’re procrastinating!
Step 1: Keep track of your daily tasks
If I would have to pick which part of the approach is most important, I’d say this is it. There’s something slightly disturbing when you see a sand glass running; you can see milliseconds as finite specks of sand, and you know once they drop, they’re done. They can’t go back.
Similar to this visceral feeling, watching a timer flashing on your screen has a similar effect.
If your coworker hadn’t tapped your shoulder, it could’ve been 5 pm, and you would still be reading blogs or just surfing the web. Losing track of time is very easy, until you can visualize it.
There are a tons of utilities to track the tasks you do and the time you take doing them. I personally played with a bunch of them — both online as well as downloadeable apps — and I’d love to hear from you any other useful ones, but I’ve found SlimTimer to be the best one out there.
SlimTimer has a little popup browser window that allows you to add tasks, mark them as complete, and start/stop them with the click of the mouse. What’s fascinating about it is that it displays a running clock, with minutes and seconds, with that same sandclock effect.
Once you have SlimTimer running, make sure to have it tracking every single second of your daily routine. If you are reading, track a “Reading” task; if you are on the phone, mark the “Phone” task; if you are having breakfast or lunch, do the same.
But the most important one of all is “Idle”. There are times when you want to just sit back, relax, go talk to your coworkers or just look out the window. Mark it as “Idle” time.
At the end of the day you’ll be surprised — I surely was — on where you’re spending a lot of time, or what might tasks that are sucking your time away.
So here’s what you do now; you want to identify patterns for the next day and the next step on our plan.
Step 2: Find your sweet spot and do the heavy lifting at that time
Every person works differently. Some are early risers, they like to get things done at the crack of dawn. Others are vampires: they have to drag themselves out of bed at 10am and slowly start their engines. As you track what and when you spend time on, you’ll recognize what times of the day you are more productive.
You’ll now be in the know of when you should be getting it done and when to do simpler or repetitive stuff, like phone calls or sending out emails.
Once you know that you’re able to handle complex stuff from 3pm – 4pm, try to do all that you can possibly do to protect that time from distractions. Turn off instant messenger (or set to busy), close Outlook/Gmail, turn off your cellphone; whatever it takes for you to get a continuous 2 hour chuck of time to do that hard stuff.
An article published in the New York Times found that a typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times. The same article puts at $650 billion a year the amount lost to unnecessary interruptions. Don’t be a part of the statistic.
Step 3: Keep a task list with completion dates
It’s very important not only to work hard; you’ve got to know where you’re headed.
For this you can use many tools, but personally, I’ve found Outlook’s task manager enough. Just make sure to enter all pending tasks with a due date, and stick to these as much as possible. Don’t take any of them out of the list until they’re complete.
If you have a big project to complete, make sure to break it in the smallest parts possible, so that you can advance little by little. Also, always concentrate on the task for the day. Don’t be looking at how much you have still pending, you’ll just overwhelm yourself.
Try to complete the easy tasks at your non-productive time of the day (see Step 1). These will warm you up for the hard ones. Make sure you see your day’s pending tasks 3 or 4 times, so that you can sort out your priorities or skip tasks that were underestimated.
Step 4: No productive time? Carve it out!
Some people will swear they have no time to work on the important stuff: their boss, their clients, their project managers keep them busy at all times, putting out fires all day.
You need to change this now. As Stephen Covey says — you need to be proactive, not reactive.
If you find your daily routine is crazy, try to have lunch at a later or earlier time than the rest of the office. You’ll find yourself some quiet time to put towards the complex stuff. If you have spouse/kids and work from home, try to wake up earlier or work after they’re all asleep.
I personally found a great way to put my commute time to use. I purchased an MSI Wind for less than $400 dollars (after rebates). The Wind is part of a new family of computers called netbooks, which are esentially ultralight and ultracheap computers. I use it to reply to emails, write for my blog, and even produce software code while I commute to and from work.
Step 5: Love what you do
One of the triggers for procrastination can be that you’re not prepared to do a specific type of work. One my developers hates to write customer-facing code or anything that has to do with visually rendering the application, so I try to always assign him the complex API/database tasks. If you’re like him, approach your supervisor and ask him politely to switch you to the type of work you like. You, as a team, will be more productive.
And last, but not least, be honest with yourself. If you don’t love what you do, you’ll procrastinate everything you do, no matter what I tell you.
As Gary Vaynerchuk says in this funny, entertaining and passionate keynote “There’s is no reason, in 2008, that you do shit you hate. None”.
{ 1 comment }
