Personal Assessment And Procrastination, Part 2.
Today’s look at why people put things off, then fall behind their ambitions because of it, is considerably less emotion-based than yesterday’s fear of failure, but it’s still very common.
It can show up for a variety of reasons, but creates the same problem regardless of what’s behind it. Basically, a person is faced with a large, multi-step job to do, and can’t decide where to start. Consequently, they don’t!
It may be that an assignment they’ve been given is something they’ve never been trained to do, and with the number of steps they’ll need to go through, it simply becomes overwhelming and causes a meltdown.
Others will be okay with the steps, but get bogged down trying to decide which step to start with. Call this failure to prioritize.
In another scenario, our subject might know where to start, but can’t stop thinking about the other steps and how important they are. Plus, he’s easily bored and wants to do something different for a change. So, he jumps back and forth between steps, making some progress in all of them, but getting none of them done. We’ll call this person “me”.
The solution to this, in these and many other variations, is fairly straight forward. But it will take some thinking, and determination.
Once you know all the steps you must go through…
1) Put them in some kind of order. This could be order of importance, typically from most to least. It could be the order in which the steps MUST be done, like pouring the foundation before you install the walls. Frequently, the job will determine the order, but if you have some flexibility here, you’ll have to go through your own sequencing. If you have no idea what step one should be, as in the case of the overwhelmed new guy, ASK SOMEONE!!!
2) As far as you can, start step 1 of your project WITHOUT worrying about, or even looking at, step 2. It may be that there’s some overlap between steps that you have to consider as you go, but the idea is to do one thing at a time and stick to it until it’s done.
3) When step one’s complete, and not before, go on to step two. And so on, and so on…
4) Congratulate yourself, you did it! Now, do it again. Your work’s not over yet.
