Engage in Creative Procrastination

Everyone procrastinates now and then, including the person in your seat at this moment, whether or not you care to admit it. It is part of the human condition. To make the best of a lingering case of procrastination, fill your time with efficient activity prior to getting started on the task you’ve been avoiding. Although you are not tackling the item that merits your current attention, you use this period of “creative procrastination” to take care of all those other things which you would eventually handle anyway.

Rather than simply frittering away the time when I procrastinate, I try to accomplish as many of the other small task as I can while putting off the big one that I know I need to be tackling. Too often, many people who procrastinate not only ignore the main task at hand but also fail to accomplish all the other little tasks that will eventually need attention. They dawdle. They surf. They hurl.

If you complete secondary tasks, eventually – when you’re able to begin the major task and finish it – the major task and all the secondary tasks are done. Given that someone is not awaiting your completion of the major task, you’re in the same place you’d be if the major task had been tackled first and the secondary ones last! So, just when you thought you were the master procrastinator, you were being productive after all! It’s a form of time-shifting. The key is to continue to do things that are of some importance during your procrastination, rather than dilly-dallying.

Once you begin to tackle the larger project or assignment, you can approach it with the mindset that “I completed all these other things and now the slate is clear to do a good job on this.” Hereafter, if you simply can’t get started on a project, undertake other secondary tasks that you’ll need to do anyway. In that way, you’re at least taking care of other useful business. Once you finally initiate and finish the big, important task you’ve been shirking, all of these smaller but necessary tasks will already have been done.

On occasion it is understandable and even desirable to do something else other than the task you had originally set out to accomplish, such as when short-term, high-priority tasks or opportunities arise. Don’t beat yourself up over such incidences – they happen to everyone. When that “something else” is finished, you can return to the task at hand. It’ll be waiting for you, “cause it’s not going anywhere by itself no matter how much you want it to.



Regards,


Timben