I would really like to put myself out there as being a hyper-organized superhuman, but in reality I have dark areas of procrastination in my life.
Doctor check ups and cleaning the baseboards fit in this category. I rather they never see the light of day.
Now, there are things that I consistently put off until later like decorating for Christmas or emptying the dishwasher – these are of no serious consequence, right? Or what about the times when I bite off more than I can chew on a project and I procrastinate because the task ahead seems so huge. Overwhelm feeds off those who squander time, I know this firsthand.
On April 15, 2023 my “I’ll do it later” mentality caught up with me and gave us all a scare. I had been putting my annual exams on auto reschedule for a “few years”. Something or someone always took priority. I justified it with being healthy and fit in my own eyes and swept it under the rug. Until this day when I was driving home from seeing my elderly Aunt Sandra and not feeling quite right. The hour-long drive home from San Diego took me twice as long. I had to pull over every few minutes to “toss my cookies”. Thinking I had the flu I went home, pulled the covers over my head and slept like a rock. Before dawn I was in the emergency room.
It took a few days to figure things out, but from bloodwork it was determined I had mono. To be exact high levels for Epstein Barr Virus are 115, mine were at an astounding 735. Evidently the virus had been partying inside for a long while! Being that my husband was a mess of broken bones from a mountain bike accident the week prior, jokes started flying around the family. Todd is in the hospital and I go out and get the kissing disease! The diagnosis’s kept rolling in though and after about four months of every test conceivable, I made up for all those doctors appointments I had put off for years. I finally had a label I could wear: Hashimoto’s Disease aka Hypothyroid syndrome.
I can live with thyroid issues. Although it has resulted in some significant personal losses for me, that I’ll touch on in a future blog. The difficult part was what I put my husband, my daughter, and my friends through in the months of not knowing because of my procrastination. There were the days when we had the “Big C” scare and I thought this is it! Then the days of not being able to take care of my husband when he really needed me after his accident. Health insurance burdens with Todd’s accident and then my health scares were a tangled web of anxiety ridden phone calls. All undue pressure and stress which could have been prevented if I had done my annual regular check ups. Instead I squandered my precious gift of time.
“I’ll do it later” is not such a big deal when it comes to putting up decorations, but when it comes to our health, our finances, our relationships – I can do much better, in fact I can, “Do It Now!”
I love what Maya Angelou says with “when you know better, you do better.” In keeping with that spirit these are five of my favorite procrastination busters, that are allowing me to make incredible strides toward achieving my BIGGEST dreams.
A new year comes around and we get overzealous with our resolutions. Our friends ask us to commit to one too many things and we get pushed over the cliff of overwhelm. I encourage all of us to get real with ourselves, our goals and our dreams. While I wholeheartedly believe in setting the bar high and dreaming beyond our comfort zone, we must do so with a balance of smaller realistic and achievable targets.
Let’s create our vision, and then break it down to where you start to feel excited about jumping in and getting started. Create room and flexibility in setting your goals for challenges. We don’t have to change the goal when an obstacle pops up, but we may need to adjust how we get there and in what timeframe.
Are you waking up in the morning and your day is already running away with you? Without a plan we are leaving our best days ahead up to happenstance, no wonder we feel overwhelmed and are going nowhere. It’s a recipe to live in endless “Groundhog Day” mode.
Once we’ve created a vision for our year, sit down immediately and create the roadmap. We CAN know where we are going and how we’re going to get there. Making a plan that has small achievable steps is like putting gas in our cars, it will get you a lot farther down the road than an empty tank!
Looking for a community to do this with? Check out www.leadmylife.com and join my LEAD My Life Program and my 90 Day Planners with Purpose.
Distractions are the greatest feeder of our time squandering ways! We can scroll away a good chunk of our day without even being conscious of the time lost. What can we do to avoid being sucked into the abyss of twenty first century tech?
Simply said, put it away – FAR, FAR away. The best solution that I’ve found is to create three blocks of DISTRACTION FREE Time Zones in my day. The duration of time is inconsequential, it depends on what I’m trying to accomplish. It can be thirty minutes for doctor calls, four hours for writing – the important part is putting my phone on do not disturb mode, or even in another room altogether. I often close my office door and ask others in my home to respect my block of distraction free time. I set an expectation of when I’ll be available and hold to it. Whatever it is that distracts me I put it away and get down to business, no excuses.
Doing this has allowed me to supercharge my days, and free up time for what I love to do the most – being outside and enjoying life with friends and family.
Making a plan that includes bite size achievable pieces is a must, but so is getting a bird’s eye view of what’s ahead. This alleviates anxiety and helps the plan to keep moving forward, keeping procrastination at bay!
In my proprietary 90 Day Planners with Purpose I help people break a plan down in the following way. One Day – Four Weeks – Three Months aka 1.4.3 Method. This gives what I call “milestone” events to target for realistic intervals of time. Not so small we get lost at sea while focusing on grains of sand. Not so out there, that we drown in the big picture. A look at time from all the angles, makes it more approachable and gets us excited about tackling our goals and projects!
If this is not the most important element of busting down procrastination in our lives then it is definitely the most FUN! Create regular intervals to celebrate forward progress no matter how small. If we keep plugging along with our nose to the grindstone, it is really easy to get discouraged or frustrated. This is especially true with a big project with a far out there due date.
I know I tend to quickly forget the things that went really well and lament forever over the failures. This completely sabotages my opportunity to finish what I started. I begin to wonder if what I’m doing is even worth it, and all sorts of other depressing things I convince myself into believing.
Celebrating our wins can be done in so many creative ways. One year I was working on giving up my addictive relationship with a certain “Green Mermaid”. We would meet daily in her convenient drive thru window, until I said, “No More!!” To celebrate this win, every day that I drove by without even glancing in her direction, I transferred $6.80 into my savings account. The amount I would have spent had I caved into seeing her again. By year’s end I had a nice little sum tucked away, a slimmer figure and a budget to get a new outfit or two.
A WIN CELEBRATED!!
Wherever we are on the procrastination scale, I find that we all have a time warp area or two that can definitely use some work. I encourage us to take one of these five tips that resonates the most and implement it. Make it a daily habit for ninety days and then try another one on for size and develop positive change around that. Now keep it going, because we are on a roll. I can see our future selves lining up at the finish ready to give us all high fives!
