A: If you are a card-carrying member of #ProcrastinationNation, then discover the key to pushing past procrastination so that you can finally get stuff done.
When it comes to getting organized, simplifying, saving time, or any goal in life, getting started is half the battle.
ONE: Find out what motivates you to dig deep and to do the things you don’t like.
TWO: Hit procrastination head-on with your motivator(s) as soon as it arrives.
PUNCH! 1, 2, 3…procrastination is out for the count. And the crowd goes wild! You are a time-management champion.
Our purpose here today is to help you discover your motivators (ONE). The other bits (TWO + PUNCH) are not easier or more difficult, but they don’t require any how-to – just action.
Keep in mind that I’ve applied the below motivators specifically to getting organized, simplifying life, and finding time. But you can relate these same motivators to other areas of your life where procrastination persists.
It’s well-established that if you simplify life, you save time.
US News and World Report recently demonstrated that the average American spends one year of their life looking for lost or misplaced items.
Any way you put it, that’s a lot of free time you could have been enjoying if you hadn’t been procrastinating.
Think about your biggest organizing problem. Let’s just say, for example, that it’s your home office.
Assume that you’re losing $21 a week, or $3 a day, in personal resources – lost time, energy, productivity, sanity – because you don’t have effective (or any) home office organizing systems in place. It’s probably much more than $3 a day, but we’ll wager conservatively.
Imagine you decide against decluttering your home office and continue down the same unorganized path for the next five years. You will lose over $5,400 of resources!
Although that $5,400 is just a hypothetical figure, it puts procrastinating about your clutter in a whole new light.
According to the book The 100 Simple Secrets of Happy People by Dr. David Niven, it’s important to establish a schedule to take your tasks from to-do to to-done.
This may seem a small percentage, but when compounded over time, it will grow exponentially – only if you don’t procrastinate!
Maybe for you, home organization is just about as fun as boot camp. But in this day in age, when life keeps getting crazier and crazier, you can’t afford not to be organized!
If you know you have to get organized, you can choose to procrastinate, and your disorganization will just cause you more frustration. Or you can choose to get motivated, get organized, and truly know the freedom that comes with it.
There can be some very undesirable consequences that accompany disorganization.
These are all results for which you (normally) have no one else to blame but yourself. Channel that “Doh! How did this happen?!” feeling you get during these lousy circumstances to attack procrastination once and for all.
It’s time to get organized, simplify life, and save time – and stop letting procrastination force you into situations where you wish that you had made these goals a priority. Shoulda, coulda, woulda.