Organize IT

Getting stuff completed often takes hard work and effort at the best of times, and it can be harder still when you aren’t motivated, or don’t even want to work on it in the first place. Even the simple two minute task can become akin to a chore if you don’t like what it is you have to do. Often just completing it is can be be a relief. But why stop there? Really reward yourself for getting stuff done.

When people write about productivity they very often give off the impression that it involves being active and getting stuff done all of the time. Productivity in its traditional sense is essentially about doing more with less. Getting more projects completed in less time. Problem with that is there is no scope for downtime. In fact downtime is taboo in traditional work environments. It’s all about making sure the machinery fails less and needs fewer repairs.

Starting something and following it through to completion provides clarity because it gets it off your mind, and a clear mind is an important element of being productive. It’s difficult to get anything done when you have twenty things pulling your mental energy in different directions. Imagine all your next actions as blips on a radar. You don’t want to start some tasks, dawdle on a project and do half jobs on your next actions, because ultimately they will still be on your mental radar taking up all your time and energy and being a major distraction. Objects won’t disappear from that radar until they are done, complete and signed off.

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.

I’m sure a lot of you can relate with me when I say that since I jumped on the productivity bandwagon, I’ve picked up lots of random little tips from my own experiences and reading other blogs. It’s not practical to just bring them all together into one big mash-up of an article, so I thought I would start a new series of posts introducing and discussing each individual tip. To get the ball rolling I want to share my suggestions on how applying a little pressure sometimes can really help you to get things done.