Productivity Tip #02: Do The Crappy Stuff First

Let me briefly describe a day I had recently. I woke up, had a wash and got dressed. I updated my blogs, then did some idle browsing. On my next actions list I had to pay a bill, fill in some forms and clean the home. But I kept putting it off. I’d find something else to do, watch a little TV, play on my Nintendo Wii. Before I knew it, it was the evening and I decided to move those crappy little tasks to the next day. Then I moved them to the day after that. By the latter stages of the week, all those tasks had been pushed back so far and I had created such a backlog, that my whole organization came crashing down.

During my weekly review I sat down and looked at what I could do about getting back on track. How could I deal with those crappy tasks, those annoying jobs and irritating little projects that were always getting put off? I’d do the fun, interesting next actions to start the day and it seemed to set the course for the rest of the afternoon. It didn’t feel like a basic case of procrastination either. The next week I took the approach of doing all those ugly next actions first thing, sometimes even doing them as soon as I jumped out of bed. It worked like a charm. Why was it so successful?

• By getting all those next actions off my radar early it leaved me with the rest of the day to do what I wanted and enjoyed. That’s much more satisfying than having the crappy next actions weighing you down all day.
• It set the standard for the day. Nothing screams being super-productive and flicking the middle finger to procrastination than getting all that horrible work done by lunchtime.

Productivity Tips: 10 Clever Ideas For Getting Things Done is an updated and expanded collection of the first ten posts in my popular productivity tips series and is now available to all for free.