Procrastination Is Your Friend
Traditionally, we have been taught that procrastination is all bad and to avoid it at all costs. Certainly, we need to be careful we don’t procrastinate to a point that hurts our productivity. But there is a good side of procrastination that highly successful people live by. Procrastination can be your enemy or an ally depending on how you use it.
In his book, Wait: The Useful Art Of Procrastination, Professor Frank Partnoy contends that when faced with a decision, we should assess how long we have to make it, and then wait until the last possible moment to do so. Partnoy went on to say that we should call procrastination, “Delay Management.” Remember, it’s the 2nd mouse who gets the cheese. I would HIGHLY recommend you watch this very insightful 15-minute talk by Frank Partnoy about his book Wait.
The procrastination catch is, you have to know how to leverage it to your advantage. Yes, there is a lazy, apathetic, and negative side to procrastination, but there is also a very strategic side to it as well.
So how can you make sure you use procrastination for success? Here are 2 quick thoughts…
1. Know How Long You Can Wait
We all have a threshold of how long we need for a task, project, or endeavor. It’s vital that you know your pace so you can correctly asses how long you need to do something. You should log your time especially when it comes to repetitive things you do in order to know how long you can wait to accomplish it in the future. Don’t allow overplanning and overanalyzing to make you work so far in advance that you lose time and focus on what is most important. Push yourself to move fast by only giving yourself a window to make it happen. In fact, studies have proven that we move faster and more efficiently when we have time constraints. Remember, Parkinson’s Law; work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
2. Always Work On The Most Time-Sensitive Tasks First
Prioritize your schedule based on what is the most time-sensitive. Don’t get distracted by shiny things that pull you away from what matters most. It’s easy to get sucked into the vortex of exciting and new ideas rather than putting our focus on what is the priority. More than likely you have more ideas, projects, tasks, and stuff to do than you have time for. You have to work on things in order. Better to hyper-focus your energy in bursts of high-intensity singularity, than to spread yourself thin over multiple tasks. Multitasking rips your focus into as many pieces as your working on. Highly successful people focus on one thing and sequentially move on to the next.
I hope this helps your productivity and helps you realize the good side of procrastination. Stop beating yourself up for a traditional mindset that causes you to feel behind all the time…sometimes it’s simply a part of life and a part of being productive.
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