Organize IT

Last week I wrote about the ‘Someday’ disease. It’s the syndrome that runs rampant in modern society. Millions of people put off their lives, goals and dreams all the time, saying they will do it someday. But when exactly? When conditions are perfect? When you  have enough experience and knowledge? In that previous post I discussed how those beliefs are little more than excuses. Conditions are never perfect so why not start now and correct course as you go along?

Someday in the future I want to get out of my apartment and get a house complete with a garden. I’ll be able to play my music as loud as I want and have somewhere to kick a football around. Someday, maybe in a few years time, I want to learn a new language and write a book. Someday. Maybe… If this sounds like the sort of thing you say, a quick trip to the productivity doctor would probably reveal that you’re suffering from a bout of Someday disease.

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Emergency! You’ve fallen off the productivity wagon. You’re tired, you’re feeling down, you’re procrastinating, you might even be a little hungover, and you feel like chucking that to-do list in the bin. We’ve all been there, and more often than not when you’ve lost your momentum it’s doubly hard to get it back again. That’s why I’ve created this guide for just such emergencies. It covers five suggestions that I personally use. The key focus is to get that momentum back and get the wagon rolling again and that’s what the following will help you to do.

As you can probably expect giving what I write about here at Organize IT, time is a big issue for me. I have hobbies and interests and goals I want to achieve and they all take up precious hours. This is actually a good thing because I’d much rather spend those hours in pursuits I enjoy rather than in mundane work. The challenge I have then is how to free up more time for the former and do less of the latter. It should be simple but it never is and I think I may have finally figured out why. At heart, we’re all just a bunch of time wasters.

Just do it. Stop procrastinating and get on with it. It really should be that simple and years ago it probably was. We should all have the doing habit – that drive inside to see our daily chores completed despite what’s on TV or our to-do list ticked off despite colleagues pestering us. But nowadays we have so many distractions, so many things fighting for our attention and so much stuff that’s so complicated, that the doing habit has been eroded away and replaced by inaction.