To Procrastinate Less, Start Doing These Five Things

According to this article in the Wall Street Journal, procrastination may not be just a matter of laziness. It may also be related to a deep emotional strategy to avoid stress. That may explain why some people are always behind on projects, appointments, etc. Human beings will do anything to avoid stress – even if it comes at the cost of more stress later.

I personally get very annoyed when I get in a procrastination state because it is self-feeding. If I get behind on a single task or project, I have to delay other tasks to get it completed. It can be a downward spiral that is hard to dig out of.

Check out this list of five things you can do to help you out of that procrastination deathtrap:

1. Be more precise in your small goals. Most people live in a very general world. They plan to get something done tomorrow, next week, etc. Stop doing that. Pick a very precise time on your calendar and commit to working on ‘that thing’ at that time.
2. Be willing to live with “done > perfect”. A lot of people I know live in the constant state of getting ready to get ready. They are waiting for the perfect time, perfect amount of money, or perfect set of training before they embark on a new effort. There is no perfect anything. There is “as good as it is right now”. Stop waiting for perfection before attacking a task you want to avoid. If it’s something you don’t know how to do, search online. Someone has likely done it before and has written out step-by-step instructions online that you can follow.
3. If something is painful, get it done sooner than later. If you keep postponing something you don’t want to do because you find it painful or annoying, realize that it is not going to get LESS painful or annoying the more you put it off. Take control and knock that task out ASAP. It’s better to plan it and plow your way though than to wait for it to become a non-optional emergency. How painful will it be then?
4. Make it hard to procrastinate. This is especially if you work in front of a computer. Put roadblocks in your way that make you have to work really hard to put off working. There are countless utilities for your computer that can block your time wasting activities on and offline. If you are someone like me who lives a lot online the first thing you should do is install RescueTime. This will help you start measuring the time you are wasting. You can then install different browser plugins that block you visiting time-wasting websites and force you to focus. As I type this right now, I have “StayFocusd” and “Kill Facebook Newsfeed” Chrome extensions installed. The former gives me a limited amount of time on social media, news, viral, and other time-wasting sites each day. The latter blocks me from seeing my general Facebook news feed and allows me to hop in and only check messages specific groups that I want to monitor.
5. Build in small rewards for small goals. Do you have any BHAGs (Big Hair Arse Goals) ? I know I have several. And they may not happen for five or ten years. When you are strategic in your life and plan for the long-term, you may get discouraged a long the way. I am sure you know that your long-term should be broken down into several short-term goals. Be sure you celebrate the short-term goals. Make a big deal about them. The celebrations will lift your spirits and remind you of the coming BHAG. It’s hard to celebrate BHAG every day when you won’t see it for months or years. But if your goal is to lose 20 pounds and you lose five, make a big about it in your life. Celebrate all successes.

Share your favorite tactic from the five above

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The Passion Forces – Part 1

The Passion Forces

Caren Glasser

What drives passionate people to work so hard? Where do they get their energy? Passion can be fueled by many factors. Let us examine 6 most important Passion Forces.

Passion Force 1- Curiosity

Curiosity. One of the most powerful triggers of human invention has been curiosity. Why does something happen? How does lightning occur? What happens if you mix two chemicals? Which route will discover new lands? The human mind is programmed to question everything around it.

Discoveries take place when this curiosity becomes a passionate driving force. It takes on a relentless unstoppable energy, which will not rest until a solution is found. Thomas Alva Edison tried out thousands of versions of the electric light bulb until he came up with one that worked. Madame Curie and her husband Pierre Curie spent all their lives unlocking the secrets of radioactivity. Steve Jobs’ search for a better computer user interface finally gave us the Apple computer with the now familiar graphical user interface using icons, which eventually spread to the whole world of computing in the form of Microsoft’s Windows.

Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Roald Amundsen and all the great explorers of the world travelled passionately in the quest of conquering new land for humanity. After centuries of looking up at the moon, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin actually walked on the lunar surface. Nothing can stop the force of curiosity and the determination that it fires up.

Success stories in the workplace often arise out of sheer ignorance. An employee may find he knows nothing about a particular field and begins learning it to satisfy his own curiosity. Pretty soon he has mastered it and is teaching the world a few new things about it.

So step out of your ‘known zone’ and venture into the unknown. There just may be a discovery waiting there, with your name written on it.

Passion Force 2 – Challenge

Our search for the sources of passion brings us to yet powerful factor – Challenge.

Without challenge in your life, you could hardly make the most of what you are passionate about. Infuse your passion with the right quest and you will do much better at it.

A challenge can be posed by a person upon himself or by external forces. A personal challenge can arise from adverse circumstances of poverty or deprivation. Rags-to-riches stories have been told for hundreds of years now. Even Presidents of countries have arisen from humble beginnings and risen to their positions of power by the sheer force of their passion.

Family prestige and a desire to prove one’s mettle to one’s elders and to society can also act as a challenging force. When a son inherits a business built by his father, he is propelled to expand that enterprise and thus demonstrate his own prowess. While most companies have boards of directors and public equity, in many traditional societies, it is the family-driven businesses that persevere, even over the centuries.

Targets set by corporate leadership also act as challenged to work teams. A keen competitive spirit between rival groups can set off a passionate chase of the markets. Pepsi and Coca Cola, Nike and Adidas, are a couple of examples of passionate rivalry, with each seeking to outdo each other in the pursuit of a better product and more sales. In these mega rivalries, passionate employees move quickly up the corporate ladder. Belief in the company’s goals and ideals is essential to engender passion in employees.

Sometimes the source of the challenge may lie closer to home. The love of a woman or one’s children can drive a man to succeed with the intent of providing better care and education for them. We are motivated to buy a larger and better house, a bigger and faster car, the latest cell phones and clothes. All these must- haves also act as challenges and rewards for our work.

It is up to each individual to determine what challenges him or her and then as Nike’s motto says – Just do it! Your natural challenge instinct will push you through. When a mountaineer was asked why he climbed a mountain, he answered – Because it is there! Its very existence as an insurmountable peak was a challenge to him!

Passion Force 3 – Legacy

When tapping on your passion, one thing that should be uppermost in your mind is that you need to leave a legacy for others.

When you are young, your motivation for working and living lies in larger income, better standards of living and in general having a good time. But as you grow older, your priorities change. You want something more fulfilling. You seek to achieve goals that you will be remembered for. A sense of urgency begins to set in as time passes. And the source of your passion arises from wanting to leave behind a legacy.

That legacy may take the form of social change brought about by your work. It can be in an enterprise or institution founded by you. Many successful businessmen set up foundations and trusts in the pursuit of noble causes. Thus they seek to perpetuate their name or family name for posterity. An invention or a new process or a novel product can also enshrine the maker’s name in the books of history.

Temporal pleasures and petty rewards do not satisfy someone working at this level. His or her passion seeks loftier goals. The greater the goal, the more fervent the passion. Revolutionaries and freedom fighters like Mahatma Gandhi and Che Guevara struggled all their lives for the liberation of their countries. Their ambitions encompassed the lives of millions of their countrymen. The sheer magnitude of their legacy consumed their entire lifetime, but it was a passionate lifetime, with every day spent in pursuit of that goal.

How do you set about leaving behind your legacy? What is it that you feel strongly about?

Write down your strongest emotions and issues. They may even lie outside your present work area. Start working on those issues. Educate yourself and acquire new skills if you have to, and get to work. It may be a simple project like improving your community, or a major reform of state laws. Remember that all the great men and women who have brought about change were ordinary men like you and me, but they had the power of conviction and passionate belief in their dreams.

If you’d like to learn more or chat with me, visit connectwithcaren.com

What’s The Importance Of Passion In Your Life?

You cannot become rich or achieve any other kind of success in life if you don’t have passion in your life or passion about what you are doing. Be it the simplest thing or the most sophisticated thing, you need passion in order to succeed.

“When work, commitment, and pleasure all become one and you reach that deep well where passion lives, nothing is impossible.”

You have a 9 to 5 job drawing a good pay, you have a good family and all’s well with the world. But deep inside, you feel like you are going nowhere. The job isn’t moving upward either. You are actually stagnating in your career and mentally and spiritually. Something is missing.

In the following days we will take a look at how important passion is and what different forms it must take in order to point our lives in the right direction, i.e. in the direction of super success.

What’s your real calling in life?

Passion. The one quality that textbooks and instruction manuals and company procedures will never talk about. Everyone is in such a hurry to make you fit perfectly into the machine like a well-oiled gear, that they forgot you are a living, feeling human being. Even you have forgotten.

Ask yourself. If I had a million bucks in the bank, what kind of work would I be doing? Would I chuck this humdrum job and move on to something really exciting? Something that I have always wanted to do? Then ask yourself – why am I not doing that right now? Is it because of peer pressure or because I don’t want to move out of my comfort zone? Don’t want to rock my boat? You are half asleep in your boat already and in a few years you could be put out to pasture! If the boat rocks now, you could be jerked awake and come to your senses. Your passionate senses.

You don’t have to wait for dire straits to rock you out of your present mediocre life. You can decide right now, that you want to live and work passionately and make your life worthwhile.

Finding Your True Passion

“Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.’
– Georg Hegel, German philosopher

So you have decided you want to live fully and passionately and reap all those rich rewards at the end of the rainbow. How do you find out what you are truly passionate about?

Here are a few steps you can take to discover the currents that move you deep inside:

1. Read your own body language. How does your body behave at your present job? Does it tense up and ache all the time? Do you get panic attacks very often? Are you so bored that you doze at your desk? Do you keep looking at the clock as break time approaches? Then you are in the wrong job. You simply don’t have the passion for it. When you work on a job that you are passionate about, all your aches and cramps will dissolve. You will find yourself working extra hours, talking to your friends about your work and simply bubbling with life.

2. What did you love doing as a child? Your childhood hobbies and obsessions can indicate a genuine passion. Education and family pressures often move us away from our true calling. Did you love bikes or gardening or trekking? Then maybe a career in the automobile or landscaping or travel industries is where you should be! So sit back and recall your childhood and write down your memories. What made you smile then may still make you grin today and in the future.

3. What do you love doing as an adult? You might very well have passionate side pursuits even today. Do you love your moonlighting job more than your regular day job? Many corporate honchos work the night shift as chefs or night school teachers. Start spending a few hours every day on your pet hobby. It may just hold the key to the real you!

Passion can be unleashed in various ways; one way is to change the circumstances that engulf you.

Sometimes to unleash true passion in yourself, you may have to change your job to suit your aptitude better. But you may find that you do love your existing job, but simply don’t feel very passionate about it. You can study your situation and then try to make a few changes to rekindle the passion you felt when you first started working.

1. Visualize yourself working passionately at your job. What would you be feeling? A sharp focus, clear vision of your future, total control and mastery over your work, a healthy body and an exuberant attitude! Then reverse engineer these symptoms to regain your passion.
2. Check on whether you work better with a team on the field rather than those solitary hours at a desk. Are you logical minded or creative minded? Are you crunching numbers when you would rather be in the design section? Get a revised aptitude assessment done. Ask your superior for a re-designation or transfer to a more appropriate department.
3. Exercise your body for at least thirty minutes every day. Let the adrenalin pump and flow in your blood. Eat healthy food and drink a lot of water. Quit smoking and using any stimulants. Restore the balance between your spirituality and physicality by meditation and prayer. Your refreshed body will invigorate your mind and passion will return.
4. Increase your knowledge of your field by taking new study courses. Take time out to travel and widen your perspective. Take a half-pay sabbatical to add new qualifications to your resume. Some lateral career movement can bring an innovative twist in your way of working.

Passion does not come overnight. Taking these proactive steps will see a gradual increase in your enthusiasm. You will begin working with a newly fired zeal, which becomes contagious, motivating your teammates as well. You will have consciously taken charge of your life again and the fruits of prosperity will be in sight once again.

Live With Passion

Caren

Set up some time to talk with me about your passion: www.ConnectWithCaren.com