Showing posts with label GTD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GTD. Show all posts

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Procrastination

Procrastination, it turns out, is an essential skill that we need to develop to accomplish things.

Most people that accomplish something, almost always achieve it by procrastinating lots of other things. So it's not procrastination that is bad, it's procrastinating the wrong things that needs to be fixed.

In the past, I've gone through phases where I do not have any goals (drifting) or phases where I have too many goals (distracted).

Without something to accomplish (drifting), I was procrastinating everything, and with too many things to accomplish (distracted), I was doing only the fun or easy things (instant gratification) and procrastinating everything else.

Here are the thumb rules I use now to figure out what to procrastinate:

  1. Choose goals that you want to accomplish. Without goals you won't get anywhere. Duh!
  2. If you came up with a lot of goals, get real and trim it down to 2-3 goals at max. If you think about it, most people that you look up to as achievers, have a single minded focus on only 1 or 2 goals.
  3. Once you've chosen what you want to accomplish, procrastinate everything that does not help you accomplish it.
  4. Life is too short for you not to get distracted by other things that give you instant gratification every now and again, so if you feel like breaking these rules sometimes, go for it - it doesn't mean you have to do it again tomorrow. Break it, enjoy it and move on.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

The Art of Achieving

In a cafe mocha (from Barista of course) induced moment of clarity in the middle of the night this Monday (22 Feb, 2010) , I finally understood why, for a while now, I've had this nagging running-in-place-and-not-getting-anywhere feeling. With this new insight, I came up with a simple Personal Accomplishment System for myself. I'll be posting more on this soon, but first I need to check if it works for me.

Friday, January 05, 2007

Work Life Balance

The Four-Day Week Challenge
A lot of the constraints and barriers we place on ourselves are completely unnecessary and even worse, keep us from being happy. My hope is that taking the Four-Day Challenge will help you enjoy life more and pursue what really matters to you.