This is a Lesson in Procrastination

This is a very important information that you would like to get access to. Don’t forget that successful people are really different from non-successful.

Positive attitude is part of the story. When you can approach the matters and other issues of your life in the positive key, you will find out that a lot becomes possible.

Even the things that have seemed to be unrealistic and absolute “dead end” stuff.

Like most people, you are often overstretched in areas of your life. Currently you are playing several different roles at any one time, e.g. Roles of a productive employee, a filial child, an understanding partner, a caring parent, a helpful friend and many other more which you seek to do well and excel in. However, there are just too many roles for you to fit into at any one time.

And in addition to that, you are obliged to adhering to the duties of every roles, their respective “shoulds” and “musts”.

The truth is regardless how well you plan your time, you only have a limited time and energy every day. There is only this much of things you can seek to accomplish daily. However, most “procrastinators” fail to realize that. Instead, day after day, they try to accomplish all their tasks in one day. And when they fail, they beat themselves up and feel that they procrastinate in completing them.

Any time management experts will tell you that attempting to do everything within a short period of time is suicidal. Eventually, you will run of gas and burn out.

Unknown to many, we are all procrastinators in this modern world. Everything you do carry with it an opportunity cost. When you decide to invest your time and energy in playing a particular role well, you will be neglecting your other important life roles at the same time. And when you fail to meet those “shoulds” and “musts” which come along with those roles, you feel that you have not done enough.

Thus, rather than constantly beating up yourself for not doing enough and hoping for a heaven-sent cure for procrastination, why not look into yourself and determine what you truly value in your life.

And it does make sense to allocate more time and energy in fulfilling those more important roles to your very best while giving less attention to other less crucial roles, isn’t it?

That will eliminate the need for you to want to do everything within a short period of time and along with it the misconception of procrastination.

This is a lesson in procrastination which took many people a long time to understand. By learning this it well, you will gradually learn not to get too overly troubled about the presence of procrastination in your life.

Read more about fighting procrastination and also about emotional freedom technique EFT.

We all know time is precious but, let’s look at the somewhat strange concept of ‘Time Killers’. There are numerous time killers in this world and what you have to do is identify these time killers, look out for them and stay wary of them. Only then can you put your available time to the maximum possible use.

The killers that I am referring to are quite ordinary every day things that we see and use in our lives but often do not realize how much of our time they take up.

Some terrible Time Killers:
Telephone calls
Chatter boxes
Traffic jams
looiking for parking spaces
Meetings
Bad machinery
Long queues

The list could, of course, go on and on. But before we keep adding to the list, I would like to elaborate on certain of the items listed above.

How to handle Time Killers.
Telephone calls.
The funny thing about telephone calls is that these instruments are indeed great time savers. The problem arises when telephones are not used properly. Most people do not understand and even if they do they forget that telephones are not to be used for lengthy conversations. A fundamental of a telephone conversation is that it should be short.

Now coming to cell phones there is a lot to be said and done. Turn off your cell phone when you are having a conversation or a discussion with more than one person. Often we tend to give more importance to the caller than to the person we were having the discussion with. Again the same rule applies here. Be brief. A cell phone is to be used to get an important message across to someone who you were not able to reach on the land line.

The next point is about those chatter boxes. Steer clear of such people. Believe me, it is much easier to avoid such people than to tell them to shut up and if you get a telephone call from such a person, use a caller ID facility or ask your secretary to divert the call.

Traffic jams and finding parking spaces.
Any one who has lived in the city for at least a day will know what I am talking about. There is no getting past a traffic jam at the rush hour. And will someone tell me why it is called the rush hour when that is the time when the traffic is the slowest and rush hour seems to last two or three hours!
The only thing you can do is anticipate the traffic jam and leave your home a half hour or one hour early. But that does not really keep the time killer at bay. It just helps you to avoid being late. In this respect you have two options. Either you could find something constructive to do while you wait for the traffic to move along or the traffic light to change or a better option would be to take subway and walk the rest of the way. You can get a long a lot faster on your feet and it is a lot better for your health as well.
By doing so, you can also get rid of the headache of finding a parking space.

Not surprisingly lengthy meetings and discussions can prove to be awful time killers particularly if the meeting does not have a clear agenda and if there are people who love to talk among the group. It has been found that most middle and senior level mangers spend nearly 70% of their work time talking. And in most organizations, parleying has been turned into a fine art.

Bad machinery is a time waster. How many of us have wanted to sit and scream and bang the daylights out of a pc that does not give us the required data or information. A computer that takes a long time to start up, a photocopier that gives shamefully faint photocopies, even a leaky faucet or a stubborn drawer or door knob can waste a lot of time and send us up the wall. If you have such equipment or machinery, get it changed at the earliest possible date. It is worth the amount of time and energy that you waste on it every day.

Long queues naturally waste a lot of time. That does not mean that you have to jump the queue. If you can get the job done over the telephone or can reserve your ticket in advance, do it, even if it means a few extra dollars, it is worth the time you may have to spend waiting.

Apart from these each person may have particular time wasters, like for instance, a car that refuses to start in the morning, difficult hair that insists on looking like Medusas head on a bad snake day, an elevator that takes for ever to reach your floor. Use your common sense and try to find alternate methods or even better, if you cannot find an alternate method, you could put the time to some use like read your morning paper in the elevator.

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