Informational Articles for 2011+

Are you a habitual procrastinator? This quiz will help you identify areas where you can take action to overcome procrastination today:

- Do you have a filing system for keeping track of your long-term and short-term projects?

- Do you believe that the right atmosphere plays an important role in determining your productivity? Do you try to design work areas so that they help you to stay focused on the task you’re doing now?

- Do you congratulate yourself when you complete a job on time?

- Do you eliminate unnecessary tasks from your daily schedule?

- Are you usually accurate in deciding which jobs can be delayed for a justifiable reason?

It’s really a good idea to probe a little deeper into the subject of Procrastination. What you learn may give you the confidence you need to venture into new areas.

- Do you stay focused on your strengths, rather than constantly worrying about your weaknesses?

Don’t deceive yourself-procrastination is the main reason people fail to live fulfilling and prosperous lives. How do you usually keep yourself moving forward when you would rather put something off? If you answered “no” to any of the above questions, make a commitment to do something about it. The following tips can help you defeat the procrastination monster today:

- Keep a diary of your successes. When you force yourself to move forward to make something happen, write it down. Make a note of how it felt to complete the job successfully. The next time you can’t get started on a hard task, or when you want to give up, open your diary a read about one of your past successes. This can energize you and keep you moving forward.

- When you have difficult assignments, make them team projects if you can. Delegate or outsource the things you dislike or don’t do well. Concentrate on your strengths. Don’t let your weaknesses paralyze you.

- When you complete a hard job, reward yourself. Do you give yourself a reward when you stick with a difficult job and see it through to the end? What things bring you joy? How can you use these things as rewards for jobs completed? Sometimes the best reward is time for rest and recuperation. As Albert Einstein said, “The idle man does not know what it is to enjoy rest.”

- Use your time well. One clear symptom of procrastination is the habit of filling your day with unnecessary work, or work that can be justifiably delayed. Create the right atmosphere at work for staying focused on your priorities. As the English statesman and author Lord Chesterfield said, “The less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it.” Make a list of what you most regret not doing in your life because of the poor decisions you made about how to use your time. There’s only one way to defeat procrastination-Do something about it now.

Don’t limit yourself by refusing to learn the details about Procrastination. The more you know, the easier it will be to focus on what’s important.

About the Author
By Anders Eriksson, still letting you get the Automated Traffic Blueprints for cheap

I believe that procrastination is the No. 1 cause of stress in our society today. Throughout history, great thinkers have noted the connection between the failure to take action and the feeling of anxiety. The American philosopher William James once said, “Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging of an uncompleted task.”

If you have the habit of putting off tasks you fear-if you tend to avoid situations and events that terrify you-your fears have grown out of proportion. Every time you decide not to do something because you’re afraid of failing, your self-confidence takes another hit. There is only one way to overcome fear-you have to force yourself to do the thing you fear. When you face your fear and do it anyway, your confidence gets a big boost. Soon you will laugh at the imaginary fears that have kept you from becoming all that you can be. And you can do something about it today.

Establish goals. Prioritize. Measure your progress. Ask friends and office mates for feedback. Adjust your goals if necessary. Reward yourself when you finish jobs. If you’re a leader, get procrastinators to encourage each other. Help them overcome their fear of getting things done. Find a mentor to help you overcome your fear. When I have to do the thing I fear, I recite a verse from the Bible: “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.” (Phil. 4:13)

Now that we’ve covered those aspects of Procrastination, let’s turn to some of the other factors that need to be considered.

Be as truthful as you can in your estimate of how long it will take to do the things you dislike. Many of the tasks we put off are simple ones. They cause an amount of stress in our lives that is altogether out of proportion to the time they require for completion. Think of when it took you much less time to do a dreaded job than you thought it would take. Can you learn something from that experience that could be applied to a task that has been left undone? Research shows that workers waste as much as a third of their workday. These same workers habitually complain about chronic stress caused by not having enough time to finish their jobs. Can you see the connection? The less you accomplish, the more you suffer from the sensation of stress and anxiety.

The only way to get at the root of the problem is by measuring how you spend your time. Keep a log of how much time you spend on things that you don’t need to do. Make a note of the things that could be done more efficiently. Try to do this for one full workday. When you analyze your list, you may be shocked at how much waste has seeped into your workday. Treat those items as a list of wasteful activities that need to be kept in check or completely eliminated. You probably don’t control the cause of all the wasted time you’ve identified. Ask yourself what you can do to eliminate those things that you can control.

As the Mad Hatter said to Alice, “If you knew time as well as I do, you wouldn’t talk about wasting it.”

About the Author
By Anders Eriksson, still letting you get the Automated Traffic Blueprints for cheap

In today’s world, it seems that almost any topic is open for debate. While I was gathering facts for this article, I was quite surprised to find some of the issues I thought were settled are actually still being openly discussed.

I’ve been planning to write a novel for the last twenty years. I keep putting it off. Best-selling author John Grisham wrote his first novel while working full-time as an attorney; he was as busy as the rest of us, but he found a way to accomplish his dream. How did he do it? He beat procrastination by forcing himself to get up earlier every morning so he could work on his book before he went to work.

Take this quiz to find out if you need to put an end to procrastination:

- Do you write down your priorities? Do some things seem less urgent when you look at them in the light of your priorities?

- Do you ask yourself which of several tasks is the most important one before you decide what task to tackle next?
- Do you accept full responsibility for missing a deadline, rather than blaming it on forces beyond your control?

- Do you focus on finishing a job on time, rather than looking for excuses to explain why you’re going to miss another deadline?

- Do you make sure people know when not to disturb you?

Is everything making sense so far? If not, I’m sure that with just a little more reading, all the facts will fall into place.

- Do you have a habit of turning off the phone when you need to concentrate completely on a job? Do you focus on the job at hand, rather than fretting over what went wrong in the past?

- When you’ve done your best, do you know when to wrap up a project?-Do you feel that spending more time on it will only keep you from starting your next job?

If you answered “yes” to all of the above questions, congratulations-you’re in John Grisham’s league. If you answered “no” to any of the above questions, pick one and make a commitment to do something about it today. Ask yourself if you have really considered all the consequences of procrastination. Do you want to live with them forever? Do you have a legitimate reason for postponing jobs? And after thinking about these questions, ask yourself if you delay tasks for justifiable reasons-or if you just make excuses to procrastinate. Here’s what I’ve learned to do:

- Always remind yourself that you have as much time as people who do great things.

- Make your best estimate of how much time a task will take.

- Write an inspirational phrase on a 3 x 5 card and use it whenever the procrastination monster pops up.

Shakespeare said, “Thoughts are but dreams till their effects be tried.” You’ve taken the first step to defeat procrastination by reading this article; now take the next step and tackle a job you know you should have started a long time ago. I took my next step this morning-I got up earlier than usual to start my novel.

About the Author
By Anders Eriksson, still letting you get the Automated Traffic Blueprints for cheap