Procrastination! what's that?

I came across these procrastination pointers and wanted
to post them with thanks and appreciation to the writer.

"PROCRASTINATION POINTERS
By: Dr. Donald E. Wetmore

Procrastination is one of the biggest enemies we have to
our Personal Productivity. Thinking about doing something
and planning to do it are fine, but what if we fail to move
ahead?
Procrastinating the unimportant items in our day is a
useful talent. The problem for many, however, is that we
are procrastinating the important and crucial items in our
day, reducing our personal productivity and increasing our
stress levels.

Here are five pointers to help you to better overcome
procrastination. (You can implement them now or perhaps
tomorrow…or better yet, next week.)

1. Daily planning the night before. “People don’t plan to
fail but they sometimes fail to plan”. Without a plan of
action in place before you arrive for work it is real easy
to get caught up in “stuff”. The phone rings, someone drops
by and you direct your time responding to the loudest
voices demanding your attention rather than to the most
important priorities on your plate. A plan of action,
prepared the night before is like a roadmap for the next
day. You know what your next step ought to be to get you
into productive action and away from procrastination.

2. Work with a clean desk. “Out of sight, out of mind.” The
reverse of that is just as true. When it’s in sight, it’s
in mind and most of us cannot help but be distracted and
our time is then directed to the less important and easier
tasks causing us to put off the more important tasks.
Working with a clean desk or clean work environment permits
us to have only the most important task before us so that
we can focus all of our attention on that task without
other visual distractions.

3. Reduce large projects to bite-sized pieces. How do you
eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Tomorrow you plan to
work on a three-hour project. The problem is, many of us do
not get three hours to work on any one item. We have to
contend with interruptions, meetings, etc. (I don’t know
that I even have an attention span that lasts for three
hours!) And we often wind up procrastinating working on
this task because “there’s not enough time to get this
done”. So, instead of scheduling the entire three-hour
project for tomorrow, schedule a small bite, a step or two
that might take 20 or 30 minutes. Then put the next step on
the next day’s To Do list and the next step after that on
that next day’s list, etc. It may take several days, but
you will get that elephant eaten up, one bite at a time.

4. Plan around interruptions. Interruptions tend to occur
in identifiable patterns. I get most of my interruptions
early in the day versus later in the day. I get most of my
interruptions early in the week versus later in the week.
So, if I plan a big project first thing Monday morning, I’m
creating stress because as soon as I begin, interruptions
arrive and re-focus my attention causing me to
procrastinate what I really wanted to do. It is so much
easier swimming downstream with the current rather than
bucking the tide. Therefore, I plan those larger projects
for later in the day and later in the week when I tend to
get fewer interruptions.

5. Assign deadlines. Have you ever failed to achieve a New
Year’s resolution? If so, that probably happened because
you did not set a deadline. Deadlines move us to action.
Without a deadline, things wind up in our “as soon as
possible” pile, a “Never Never Land” where items will get
attended to “someday”, “when I get the time”. Create a
deadline and you will be moved to action."

End of pointers.

While on the subject of procrastination, I wanted to start
updating my blog on a daily basis but I think I'll wait till
tomorrow. Just chidding. Just recently I purchased this
amazing program called Prosperity Automated System
and eventhough I have not sent one email about it to
anyone, I am already getting visitors to the program
itself and to my other affiliate programs 1Step,
Wealth Pools, Canadian Diamond Traders, All by simply following the
instructions that concentrate on harnessing search engine traffic.

Finally, I would like to wish you, whover is reading this
post, and all my friends and online associates
a happy, healthy and prosperous new year.