Procrastinate Later

If you find yourself facing a decision or working on a project that you think you'll want to delay, try this. First list how you'd procrastinate – for example, by organizing your desk or catching up on some filing.

rocrastination need not be strictly resisted at all times. In fact, allowing yourself to delay certain activities from time to time can help keep you motivated to complete your work and stay decisive. Sometimes, when you feel the urge to procrastinate, you can stay focused on your tasks, but allow yourself to procrastinate later.

If you find yourself facing a decision or working on a project that you think you'll want to delay, try this. First list how you'd procrastinate – for example, by organizing your desk or catching up on some filing. Then give yourself some time later to do one of these things. However, make a commitment to work for a fixed amount of time on your task beforehand.

Consider Lauren, an office administrator at a large sales company. She's been asked to find a new telephone and Internet contract for the office. To do so, she needs to contact a number of providers in the area and determine which can offer the company the best service at the best price.

When Lauren starts compiling a list of service providers to contact, she remembers that she has some phone calls to catch up on. But she realizes that this would be avoiding the work at hand.

However, she doesn't ignore the temptation. Instead, she decides she'll allow herself half an hour to deal with the phone calls after she has spent the next hour looking for companies to speak to. She also commits to returning to contacting service providers after the 30 minutes are up.

When you commit to spending a certain amount of time working before allowing yourself to move on to a procrastination-type task, ensure that it's a reasonable amount of time. Telling yourself that you'll work for four hours and only then allow yourself a diversion can result in an even greater urge to procrastinate. Short amounts of time spent working are effective and may give you the momentum needed to forgo the diversion altogether.

QUESTION

Graham is a lead architect at a firm. The firm has been approached to design a new library for the city, and Graham needs to decide whether the firm has the resources to do the job.

What can Graham do to allow himself to procrastinate later to avoid delaying his decision?

1. Recognize that he'd likely be looking at examples of famous libraries, instead of concentrating on whether the firm can do the job
2. Commit to spending half an hour reviewing his and his employees' availability for the next year before allowing himself a diversion
3. Promise himself he'll put in five hours of work before allowing himself to move to one of his procrastination activities
4. Recognize his desire to procrastinate and refuse to submit to it, instead forcing himself to push ahead with his central task

By thinking about what he'd likely do to procrastinate, Graham can plan to allow himself this diversion later.

By forcing himself to work for a short amount of time before some planned procrastination, Graham can accomplish something and generate momentum.

While it's important to commit to working for a period of time before allowing a diversion, this should be a short amount of time that can be easily attained.

It can be useful to allow some procrastination, as long as it comes after a period of productivity. Simply ignoring the urge can be ineffective because the temptation may grow stronger.

Procrastination is a barrier to decisiveness that can be difficult to overcome. Self-discipline is essential if you want to avoid being tempted by procrastination. This involves being able to set aside immediate pleasures in favor of achieving larger goals in the future.

There are three actions you can take to avoid procrastinating about a decision. First, learn to motivate yourself by focusing on either the rewards of your success or the consequences of failing to achieve your objectives. Second, recognize and get rid of excuses by asking whether you're looking for reasons to delay something and determining how you can stay on task. Finally, intermittently allow yourself to procrastinate after forcing yourself to stay on task for a short period of time.

I have been teaching and training agents, team leaders, supervisors, managers and admins of call centers and other businesses in BPO related fields. This series, comes as a result of that experience. I have more than 4,000 modules that I plan on sharing here. This is # 005-06

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