subject: Avoid The Procrastination Bug By Pacing Yourself [print this page] New Years commitments are great but how many have you stuck to over the years? When I think back on it I realize that I haven't truly stuck with any ever, and I'm a pretty motivated person. Maybe they work for some, and if any have worked for you that's great. But the truth is you can make personal commitments at any time, it can be on a wednesday and it doesn't even have to be a specific day of the week. You might have decided today is the day I'm going to get up and make some positive changes in my life. I think the best way to go about procrastination on things is to decide on one thing you will do today and stick with it. For example a year ago we had a very messy house. We're not hoarders but over the last 30 years we collected memorabilia from all over the world from my military traveling and just cool stuff that of course we never use anymore. Not only was our house cluttered but our garage was as well.
A friend of mine told me once that the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. What they meant by this is that if you have a major task on your hands, then the best thing you can do for yourself is to break up the task into smaller tasks that are more manageable. For example if you have a garage that will take 4 weeks to clean out and you know your garbage man will only accept 3 trash cans per week from you, don't stress it. Yes that's another thing, make sure you don't stress out about extra work you need to do. Just break up a big job into a bunch of little jobs. Each week use one of your trash cans to clean out just a small portion of your garage. If you know there are 8 trash cans needed to clean out your garage, why to go the extra expense and hassle of renting a dumpster and killing yourself over the next week?
Just spend an hour or so each week and fill up one trash can, but be consistent and do this until your entire garage is clean. Trash men get paid real well actually, so they are just doing their job so don't worry about the extra work you put them through, believe me you pay for this service anyway so use it. I did this and within 2 months our garage was spotless and my mom could finally walk in there and get what she needed without feeling intimidated. Another example is for a website I'm promoting right now I know up front it will probably take me writing about 500 articles for it to take off. On a good day I can write 5 but not every day. Some days I'm just not mentally up for the task. Also my internet business requires me to do other things which also slows down my writing time. Yes I'm under pressure to get it done as fast as possible, because as soon as the site gets lots of traffic I will start getting paid and boy do I need the money now.
But I'm realistic and also understand that if I try to rush it I will just burn out and get angry and stressed out. How I avoid this is by committing myself to writing 3 articles per day over the next 6 months or so. Even at the worse conversion scenarios the site will take off. Sure I could outsource this but at $8.00 per article written and submitted it would start getting pretty expensive, and I just don't have $4,000 discretionary money right now, so I have to rely on my own talents and do the manual labor myself until I'm in a position to outsource and just manage things. This concept will work with anything else like school assignments as well. If you have a research paper due and a final, do the research paper first. Then the next day start studying for your final. Don't let everything build up to the point that you need to work 12 hours straight just so you can pass your classes. I hope this article will put some of your tasks in better perspective for you.
