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 had built up so much, that they came crashing down on top of me and I ended up doing very little at all.
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 day. It didn’t feel like a basic case of procrastination either. The next week I took the approach of doing all those crappy next actions first off, sometimes even doing them as soon as I jump 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 full information please view its dedicated page.
October 18, 2007 at 03:25PM
Yep, I learned a long ago that when you start your day, think of the thing you DON’T want to do the most and do it first. It takes away a lot of anxiety and stress and you can then enjoy the rest of your tasks a lot more. Great post!