From Procrastinator to Productive

Do you find yourself rushing to complete tasks in which you told yourself that you would not wait until last minute? Have you ever forgotten to complete something until it is almost too late? To make it worse, you rushed to complete it and when it is done, you know that you could have produced higher quality material if you had not waited until the last minute.

Parkinson's law is the adage that “work expands so as to fill the time available for it’s completion." If you give yourself a day to do something it takes you no longer to complete the actual task than if you give yourself a month to complete it.

Let us look at a very simple example: The task ahead of you is to write another blog post and you have determined that it does not need to be completed within the next 10 days. It is not pressing, so you put it off with every intention of working on it in a couple days. We come to the day before you intended to publish the post and you realize that the article has not yet been written. Hurriedly, you sit down to compose an article with the total time spent on the actual writing being about 1 hour.

There are two ways of looking at how long it took to complete writing the article. You can measure it by the actual time it took to compose the article OR the time it took from when you originally noted it as a task to complete. Since you gave yourself 10 days to complete the task, while the actual composing only takes about one hour, you took 10 days to do it. In other words, one hour became 10 days.

How do you avoid making one hour stretch into 10 days? Start by making a list of tasks that need completed and make this list at the beginning of your day. Using the Eisenhower Matrix is the best way to approach this list, but we will address that in another post. By having a list in written form, it helps you to keep track and it also allows you to visually see when a task is completed. The act of marking a task complete will help to produce a sense of accomplishment which only further pushes you to be productive. Making the list early in the day allows you to prioritize your day in such a way that you have the best chance of completing all the tasks and not interfering with your other scheduled appointments.

Time blocking your tasks on a digital calendar will aid with making sure that you schedule specific times for completing tasks based on your overall schedule. We will discuss time blocking in a future post. Time blocking is a useful tool in managing and prioritizing your “to do” list and it will allow you to use the Parkinson’s law to its full advantage. It works best when you input ALL tasks in a time block. This will guard against the tendency to put it off. Even if you put it in a time slot on a different day that ends up not being the best time for it, it is very easy to revise it by moving it to a different time block. When you use this tool, never take a task off your list until either you complete it or it is no longer necessary to complete.

Even those who don't find themselves to be very organized could find that by making lists and scheduling your tasks, you will be able to accomplish more within a shorter time frame. We will follow up with information on the Eisenhower Matrix and time blocking in the future to further help you manage your time more effectively.

Remember, time is money.

Do not waste your time.