Do you get excited about lots of new goals and ideas, only to abandon them before they reach completion? Procrastination can be the death knell of many projects that could have seen success, if only … What skills do we need to avoid failure to finish?
Too much choice makes it harder for us to decide; it’s called the paradox of choice. Think of those endless trips around the supermarket aisles. The more types of something you see, the harder it gets to decide. Whilst you can buy two kinds of bread just in case, it’s not nearly as possible to double up when it comes to a washing machine or a sofa. Before you know it, the excitement turns into a chore as you endlessly research the subject, learning about different types of the product you want, and soon you feel as if you were doing a degree course. Then you realise that life is too short to spend hours researching washing machines or types of sofa, and you abandon the project.
Some ideas are meant to stay just that – ideas. A lot of what we think up is not that great. Even Thomas Edison knew it, and he invented the lightbulb, but not before a lot of trial and error. So do what he did, don’t beat yourself up by calling it failure, just inventing 10,000 ways that don’t work. Let go of them and move on.
It is okay to trust your gut feeling sometimes. Some decisions are too important to simply flip a coin. From medical treatment to what house to buy or what school to choose for the children, you have to pick wisely as you will have to live with your choice, so lots of research is justified. But other decisions do not warrant a lengthy investigation. If you are indecisive about which fitness class to join, think about the bigger picture: does it really matter what exercise you do, as long as you do it? Surely some exercise is better than none? If your instinct is telling to just get on with it, trust it. So often the first thought on the subject is correct, the rest is procrastination.
Prioritise. Do the important tasks first. The sort of decisions that have the biggest impact should come first. So bite the bullet, call that important client first and get the big task done. Then you can deal with the hundreds of emails cluttering your inbox. Consider how writing one difficult letter can take an hour but so does deleting and replying to many emails. Ask yourself which task is weighing heavily on your mind. Then do that task first, and the rest will go quickly.
Create a deadline. You are probably already familiar with the problem described as work stretching into the time slot available. In other words, the more time you have, the longer you will take to complete a task. The solution is to break up your to-do list into smaller, more manageable tasks and put a deadline on each. Don’t start working until you’ve made a list with deadlines. Then keep ticking the items off and feel good about it.