Anti- procrastination song

Why is it that we hardly ever get done all of the things that we want to do in a day? Believe it or not, it is because we have trained ourselves not to.

We talked the other day about habits. While by nature we may have a fair number of good habits we tend to have more bad than good. That is of course until we train ourselves to have more good than bad.Training ourselves to have more good habits is what enlightenment, self improvement and in fact success in general are all about.

The biggest bad habit that I have seen within myself and that I see mirrored in other people is procrastination, but maybe not the way you normally think about that word. Yes, we are all guilty of having this one thing in front of us that we don't want to do and consciously or otherwise looking for anything else to do instead.

But that is not exactly what I am talking about. What I do is a little less direct. My pattern tends to be more along the lines of putting everything off because I am just not ready to get started yet. I want to just accomplish this one more thing in a game I am playing or catch the end of the anime that I started watching. And then there's just one more thing and one more thing and before I know it my day is more than half over and nothing is done.

Personally, I do some of my best work when I am under pressure and running out of time. I know this and tend to use that fact against myself as a reason why it's okay to not get started until I only have five hours left to do twelve hours worth of work. But the problem with this is that sometimes unexpected things come up that eat up even more of the little time that I have left myself and then it is no longer possible even if I rush.

Does this sound at all like something that happens to you?

There's a pretty simple solution but it takes a bit of discipline to make it work for you. When you get up in the morning make a list of all the things you should get done that day. Put them in the order of their importance and estimate how long each one should take you to do. I like to give myself about eighty percent of the time that I think a thing should take me to do, that way I'm putting myself under pressure. And even if I don't finish a certain thing within the time I have allotted for it, I still have part of my day left over to finish up. If you don't work well under pressure, give yourself a little extra time for each thing. At the end of the list put all of the stuff that you would normally do to put things off as the reward for you having gotten your "chores" done for the day.Then get to work.

With this method you get the most important things done. And if you don't get everything done this way, you would not have gotten them all done any other way either. IF for some reason that does end up happening, don't beat yourself up about it, just add the things you did not finish today to the beginning of your list tomorrow. If this happens every day for a week or so, then perhaps you need to look into simplifying your life and reducing your overall amount of commitments.