Procrastination

The Midday Check

April 19, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Do a midday review daily to determine how you’re progressing on the day’s goals.

Consider whether you’ve been scurrying from one project to another, constantly hustling to meet deadlines, or feeling like you haven’t accomplished much up to that point. Filter out low-value tasks and ruthlessly make time for what’s still important in the day. Set time limits for tasks—there’s no driving force better than a challenging deadline.

If you’re often derailed by side issues or significant changes that set your days askew, use this midday check to find extra time in your day merely by reprioritizing and reorganizing how you’ll approach the tasks that fall within your responsibility.

Avoid Being Money-Rich and Time-Poor: Summary of Ashley Whillans’s ‘Time Smart’

April 13, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Stress and life dissatisfaction are often caused by being chronically “time poor”—having too many things to do and not enough time to do them. We equate time poverty with success and pay the physical and emotional price of rushing around.

Harvard academic Ashley Whillans’s Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life (2020) shows that people with more free time are happier, healthier, and more productive than people who work all the time and make more money.

The effects and costs of time poverty are so stark that researchers now compare it to a famine—a severe, drastic shortage of time affecting all of society—that carries many of the attendant negative consequences that a natural disaster produces. … No matter our age, education, or income, we share the same reality: none of us knows how much time we have left. One day, time runs out and tomorrow never comes. … Chasing money is valuable to a point, but it’s an infinite errand. You can always try to get more—and research shows people do that, no matter how much money they have already. Given how precious time is, we should put it first.

Idea for Impact: Develop a time-centric mindset and work fewer hours if necessary. Consider time as currency and become more purposeful, dodging mindless tasks and unfulfilling chores. Ask how much time you will give up for more money or productivity. Money is a powerful tool that can buy you time and amplify your freedom to pursue your values and priorities.

What You Most Fear Doing is What You Most Need to Do

March 24, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Sometimes when you’re anxious about things, you tend to push them out of your grasp. Instead of evading from frustrating encounters thus, ask yourself, “What can I do that’ll make me more competent to tackle this problem?”

Don’t postpone the problem. Start with a baby step. A single, small accomplishment may promote new feelings of accomplishment and spark a sense of self-confidence. You’ll be pleased with yourself for taking charge.

When you like yourself better, you’ll begin to get more productive and improve your life in small ways, which can lead to bigger achievements.

First Things First

February 27, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Most people have the disposition to work on easy, accessible, or pleasant tasks while putting off tasks that seem tedious or difficult.

Using minor tasks to put the big tasks on the back burner is a particularly deceptive form of procrastination. You pat yourself on the back for checking items off your to-do list, but all you’ve done is deferred the more critical, time-consuming work until the end.

Sure, you need to exercise, check your Facebook wall, run errands, tidy your desk, catch up with a buddy, and plan your next vacation. But don’t use these activities as excuses for not preparing the progress report whose due date is creeping up on you.

One of the self-help guru Stephen Covey’s familiar 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) is the discipline of classifying essential things that need to be prioritized. Habit 3, “put first things first.”

Idea for Impact: Delaying a critical task hardly makes it easier. When tempted to procrastinate, first catch yourself making an excuse. Don’t let the little necessary tasks trivialize the more substantive work.

How to … Stop That Inner Worrywart

February 22, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

I’m one of those incessant worrywarts. Risk mitigation is a significant facet of my work. Thus, I worry about the prospect of non-optimal results; I worry about the unintended side effects of my decisions, and I worry about what people aren’t telling me. I even worry that I worry too much (now, that worry is entirely unfounded.)

If, like many people, you’d like to worry less, perhaps you may find the following approaches helpful. Most of my over-worrying comes from thinking ahead, but after a reasonable effort to understand risks and make plans to adapt more flexibly to developing situations, I’ll just let up. I’ll self-talk as though I’m addressing a team, “Not everything is within our control. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Let’s deal with it as it appears and course-correct.” Beyond that, I’ll get really busy with something else that keeps me too occupied to fret about the previous thing that worried me.

Trying to Be Perfect is Where Your Troubles Begin

February 20, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Fear of failure is one of the insidious confidence killers. Instead of living life in a place of self-acceptance, many folks try to live up to unrealistic ideals. They’re on a continual treadmill, chasing the illusory feeling of urging on everything in their lives to be “perfect.”

When you cling to the all-or-nothing standard, all your endeavors result in perfection or failure. This mindset drives you to see yourself as a disappointment again and again.

Let go of dichotomy. You needn’t be “perfect or failure.” Don’t build yourself up to fail with the unattainable goal of always being perfect. Instead, set goals that are very achievable and within your control. Make your goal just to take action. Not to achieve a perfect outcome, not even to a positive outcome, but just to be done. Completed with a satisfactory result. Checked off.

Idea for Impact: You don’t have to give 110% or even 100% to everything you do. Be very selective about when you want to push yourself to the max—only when the stakes are big enough and when your perfectionism is thoroughly justified.

How to … Make Work Less Boring

January 28, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Time passes faster when you divide a big chunk into lots of smaller chunks. So, if you’re on an inescapably boring path, break it into units. And, for each dreaded task, ask yourself, “What’s the most fun way I could do this?” Work at a coffee shop? Listen to your favorite music? Reward yourself upon its completion?

As Mary Poppins pleaded, “In every task that must be done there is an element of fun. You find the fun and snap! The job’s a game.”

Do You Really Need More Willpower?

January 5, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Sure, self-discipline is an asset. Plenty of successful people evidently benefit from having truckloads of it. However, strengthening willpower may not always be easy for the rest of us.

You can increase productivity and contentment simply by altering your environment. Make it easier for you (and others in your life) to confront temptation and adopt the habits you want.

Use stimulus control to shift your behavior:

Want to stop taking on more debt? Freeze your credit cards.
Can’t stop checking your phone for likes, comments, texts, tweets, and game requests? Disable the apps.
Want your household to be more organized? Establish routines and make things easy to put away with clearly labeled receptacles.
Want to switch to healthier snacking choices? Splurge on pre-washed, pre-cut, grab-and-go vegetables.

You’re more likely to start change when you put the stimulus for action into your environment.

Idea for Impact: Don’t get bogged down by thinking that lifestyle changes are entirely about willpower. In a world so heavily baited with pervasive cues and craving-inducing stimuli, the more you can tweak your environment to better condition yourself into your desired habits, the more likely you are to meet your goals.

Use This Trick to Make Daily Habits Stick This Year

January 2, 2023 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The best way to catalyze significant change is by relying on highly specific habits and routines and making time for them amid the busyness of life.

Habit formation relies on consistency. Here’s a simple trick to prevent good intentions from slipping.

Suppose that you want to start a daily walking habit. You set a target to go for a walk for at least an hour a day. But some days, this habit might not be doable.

Consistency & Small Habits = Big Results

To prevent slipping on your daily goal and beating yourself up about it, establish two targets: one for the “good” days and one for the “tough” days.

Set the bar very low for when it’s not possible to dedicate an hour to walking. On the tough days, when you’re exhausted, hungry, feeling lazy and unmotivated, or you’re simply not in the mood to walk, you can go for a quick walk. And on good days, when you have more time and energy, go for longer walks. Average out the tough days with the good days.

Make it so easy that you can’t say no to maintaining your habit on the tough days. You’ll decrease your skipped days and sustain the habit’s consistency by lowering your expectations.

Another benefit of having easy-win targets for the tough days is that you nudge yourself into action. Let’s say you target reading an hour a day. On tough days, when you set out to read for just ten minutes, you’ll perhaps get engrossed in more of the task once you get started and find your way into the text. Action begets momentum, and you’ll find it easier to keep going at it.

Idea for Impact: Consistency is the Foundation of Building New Habits

Habits take a long time to create, but they develop faster when you do them more routinely and repeatedly. The more days you skip, the harder it is to get back into the habit. Set the bar low for the tough days and build deep-seated habits.

Change Your Mindset by Taking Action

November 17, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

While it is helpful to be motivated and get into the right mindset to, say, exercise, it’s far easier to just show up at the gym and get started on a small quest, even when you don’t really feel like doing it. You’re likely to habituate to new behaviors in a way that circumvents your innate resistance to change.

Minor adjustments can add up and make a big difference. As Harvard psychologist Susan David writes in Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life (2016,)

Traditional self-help tends to see change in terms of lofty goals and total transformation, but research actually supports the opposite view—that small, deliberate tweaks infused with your values can make a huge difference in your life. This is especially true when we tweak the routine and habitual parts of life, which then afford tremendous leverage for change.

Idea for Impact: Waiting for the right mindset to “show up” can be a losing strategy. Taking action is often easier than controlling your mental state. Don’t overly focus on the very thing that’s harder to control. Take the next baby step forward.

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Procrastination

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Consistency & Small Habits = Big Results

Idea for Impact: Consistency is the Foundation of Building New Habits

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