Overcoming Procrastination: For You and Your Clients

admin — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:08:53 +0000

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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The Clock Is Ticking

admin — Thu, 21 May 2009 03:37:05 +0000

Here’s a confession of a personal failing I have: I’m optimistic. Okay, so most readers would agree that optimism is probably a good trait to possess and I’m not disappointed by it. However, the confessional/personal failing is related to the result of my optimism: An unrealistic sense of what I can accomplish in a day.

If I were to sit down and plan out my week at the beginning of the week, it’s not unusual to think to myself "I can schedule 7 one-hour appointments in my day, each day, and that will make for a very productive week". So I do that. I block out hour-long chunks of time and schedule appointments in each block.

Then reality hits as the week progresses: Clients paying for an hour consult expect a full hour, not 50 minutes. Sure, some don’t care but some watch the clock pretty closely. Other clients, in spite of my best efforts, have a hard time wrapping up at the end or tend to stay a few minutes longer for chitchat on what they believe is not billable time (while billable clients are waiting outside the door). Clients are late and beg that we tack on the missing fifteen minutes on the end of the session (cutting into the time I’d planned to do other things).

I’m not saying that every week is like this, nor am I saying that all of my clients are like this. But the small things add up. It might be a phone call here or a delay at the restaurant during lunch there or an unexpected detour on the way to work in another morning.

So, my problem is that I’m optimistic in terms of my ability to complete the tasks within the period of time I’ve assigned; and I’m optimistic that the world won’t turn against me with one ironic twist after another.

My solution, which is far from perfect, is to build some margin into my day. If I’m expecting one hour sessions with clients, I should schedule them with a half-hour buffer zone in between. I won’t be twiddling my thumbs during that time, I’ve got calls to return and I can do a bit of marketing, and take a little bit of "me- time" to clear my head.

And do you know the result I discovered? I’m more productive. It seems counter-intuitive to say that, especially as the optimist that I am, but it’s true: I’m not rushing from one thing to the next as the day progresses and then furiously trying to catch up at the end. Instead, my day is calm and ordered.

Okay, I lied, it’s not calm and ordered. But it’s calmer and more ordered than it was… Most of the time! But I confess that there are still days when I forget that the clock ticks as quickly as it does and I think I can do it all.