From the course: Time Management Tips

Positive procrastination

From the course: Time Management Tips

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Positive procrastination

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- Take a moment and open up your calendar and look at the activities that you've scheduled for yourself. I'm not talking about meetings with other people. Just you, by yourself, working on a project of some kind. How many of those activities are scheduled further than 90 days into the future? In my experience, most people aren't scheduling things to work on that far in advance. In fact, most people have a very short term perspective. They're looking at only what can be done in the next week or two weeks. The result of this perspective is a calendar that's just crammed full of activities, which is dangerous place to be in the 21st century world, in which we're going to be interrupted. You want to leave plenty of space in your calendar and one way to do that is through positive procrastination. I actually encourage people to not stop procrastinating, but just get better at it. Now, what do I mean by positive procrastination? Negative procrastination, of course, we're all familiar with that, that's just pushing things off indefinitely and they never get done. Positive procrastination, though, is a committment to work on things, just in the future. Positive procrastination frees up time and it gives us more room to be prepared for emergencies and interruptions when they happen. Positive procrastination helps us focus on our most valuable activity. So, how do we get better at it? First of all, we use the calendar always. Anytime we want to schedule anything, not just meetings with other people, but meetings with ourself, as well, we always put it to the calendar, even if we're going to schedule some down time, put it in the calendar. This sets you up to use procrastination positively, which leads to the second tip, which is when should we schedule these things? And the general rule of thumb I like to use is the latest minus 5%. So if something is due a couple of months from now, we're not going to schedule it right at the end of those two months, but maybe back a week, that gives you enough time to get it done, with a little breathing room in case something goes wrong. Now, when you schedule things on the calendar, the third tip is to commit to it. When we put things in the calendar, we're essentially entering into a contract with ourselves. Many people are good at keeping appointments with other people, yet struggle a little bit with the appointments with theirselves. When you put something into the calendar, tell yourself, "I am committed to this," and the fourth tip, what if you're not committed? What if you have something that you might do? Well don't put it into the calendar, use a perhaps list. A perhaps list is where you have a running list of all the wonderful ideas that you have, that you haven't really committed to yet, and just review that perhaps list on a regular basis, maybe once a month or once a quarter. Positive procrastination can be your friend, it can help you get more done and have more room to focus on what you do best. So don't stop procrastinating, just get better at it.

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