Finding Time in a Forest of Procrastination

The Time Finder with Paula Eder

The way you use your time is the way you live your life.

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Posted on January 15, 2009, under Time Choices.

I just checked my TweetLater Keywords Digest and saw that Procrastination continues to be far and away the busiest word in my collection. Clearly, it’s on people’s minds. I’ve only been tracking it for a few months – so this may be a New Year’s Resolution related blip. We shall see.

Anyway, I thought that I’d share a few of the blog posts and articles referenced in the tweets, and highlight some tips and comments that caught my eye.

First, there is a post by Terri Zwierzynski (TerriZ of Solo-E.com) which spotlights The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur’s piece titled “31 Deadly Time Wasting Mistakes Plaguing Your Life and Killing Your Company.” These tips have a business-oriented slant and offer some very practical, no-nonsense advice, such as this (for social-networking “addicts”):

10. Spending Too Much Time on Twitter/Facebook and E-Mail?

Twitter Solution-TweetDeck organizes twitter so you don’t feel like you consistently have to monitor a screen.
Facebook Solution- Turn off all notifications in your e-mail except friend requests. Spend a specific amount of time during the day to catch up on all of the facebook activities.

Also in the business vein, we have a series of blog posts on procrastination on Narek Gabrielyan’s Strategic Internet Marketing Blog. He starts with a focus on Analysis Paralysis and goes on to offer some practical ways to get unstuck! These posts will be especially interesting to those of us for whom perfectionism can be an issue. If you are someone working on the internet, perfectionism can be particularly challenging, as it slows things down so much. Here’s just one helpful passage from Part 3 in this series:

“The Faster You Fail, The Sooner You Will Succeed” (more on this in later posts)

There are TWO mindsets that you can adapt in order to overcome Analysis Paralysis and Information Overload issues.

1. You Don’t Have To Get It Right, You Simply Have To Get It Going. In other words, you don’t have to be perfect the first time. It is important to get something rolling by getting the major pieces that are essential and you can always come back to fix the small things and tweak things. This is extremely important on the Internet, considering how fast things move, happen and change online.

Don’t sweat the small stuff, most of the time, it can be fixed faster than you think.

In The Content Summaries Blog we find Five Simple Ways to Overcome Procrastination – a post including the good, basic advice to “just begin.”

No matter how large or insurmountable the task may seem, beginning with even a small action will build momentum. Simply beginning also tends to put the task into perspective and makes it seem more possible than ever.

And finally, in Phil Runs London we have a post titled “Procrastination or Self Preservation?” that explores the crucial difference between procrastination and self-care, and emphasizes the importance of taking things one step at a time. (That’s not procrastination but actually a way to avoid the sort of self-sabotaging that can literally stop you in your tracks! (Check out our recent post on the whole idea of easing in …)

How do you manage your procrastination? Do some of these tips resonate for you? I’d love to hear!

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Let’s explore time together …