Overcoming Procrastination: For You and Your Clients
This is an account of a colleague of mine (who gave permission for this to be posted). She had been asked a series of questions about various aspects of productivity and this was her response to a question about procrastination.
"… I used to be a procrastinator. I admit it. As someone who is connected to the web all day long, it was easy to surf. I had friends who sent me links to funny news stories, hilarious videos, humorous pictures, etc. And I shared back with plenty of things. I had a list of blogs that I read faithfully every day. I browsed social networking sites incessantly. If Twitter was around then (this was a couple of years ago now) I would have been on it constantly, too. Email was always open in front of me. And I had bookmarked a number of magazines whose online editions I read diligently.
In short, I would end a busy day with the realization that I had done very little. My busy day was just a façade. It was busy, but not with anything truly productive. I had little to show for each day. I still earned pretty good money and I did run a successful practice, so it was hard to notice.
But slowly, that procrastination eroded my effectiveness. It’s hard to believe now but I slowly and imperceptibly marketed less; I slowly lost clients; I slowly started to erode my business. It never got to the point where I was in dire straits, but in retrospect, my practice diminished.
I’d like to point to a time when I woke up and said "enough is enough" but it didn’t happen overnight. It was over the course of a few months when I realized that I had let things go and I needed to get back on track. I can’t point to a single catalyst but I can point to a few months in which I came back from the brink.
That was about 3 years ago. Since then, I’ve made dramatic changes: I limit my time on sites like Facebook and Twitter. I culled my blog reading to just a few minutes a day and only AFTER I’ve accomplished a pre-set list of tasks. I picked 3 favorite magazines and I read them when I’m not at work. While those were helpful strategies, the most effective thing I did was to make a covenant with myself that I would not become distracted during my work hours.
And it worked. I haven’t been this productive in a long, long time. It’s a good feeling to be focused again.
It seems to me to be a lot like a garden I once kept. It was a beautiful flower garden at the side of my house. But then I went away on vacation and when I returned I had a family emergency that took my attention away for a couple of weeks. When I finally returned to my garden it was a bed of weeds and it took a long time to work through those weeds and take control of the garden again."
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We rarely find time from our regular schedule for other works. One way is to set up small goals everyday and then sticking up to them. That can really help.