Time Management Versus Procrastination

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

How often in life have we decided that tomorrow, or rather, from Monday, our whole life will be different: in the morning - jogging, dinner - to the enemy, three times a week - the gym, and on weekends - general cleaning and order on the bookshelves

Well, and there is nothing to say about the New Year: the plans with their scope surprise not only our loved ones, but also ourselves …

But Monday passes, the next year is already coming, and instead of fulfilling the adopted plan, time is spent on unnecessary little things. Why is that?!

Procrastination. Another super-scientific word that is actively being introduced into our vocabulary after fashionable frustration, adaptation, phobia and other borrowings from English. Literally translated, procrastination means procrastination, non-start, and explains why people put off important things “for later” and take up time for no one with unnecessary things, on which they spend twice as much time as on actual work.

Moreover, men and women, managers and subordinates, adults and children suffer from this disease equally. Irina Khakamada, with her amazing talent for generalizing and classifying information, noticed that not only fashion corresponds to each time, but also secular diagnoses reflecting the mood of most members of society.

Thus, the 19th century, with its lazy approach to the industrial age, lived with hippochondria, influenza and migraines. The 20th century - an aggressively bloody and large-scale industrial - killed the fashion for a subtle game of medical and psychological terms and we entered the 21st century, an age of excessive individualism and post-industrial stress, with trends for autism, dyslexia and procrastination. Although fashion and passes, but the life experience of any of us shows that the problem, whatever you call it, remains. And now, as never before, we are turning more and more from active figures in our life into passive consumers, swallowing what the oversaturated information environment offers with its traps in the form of television series, YouTube, Yandex, LiveJournal, etc.

We are constantly busy and at the same time we do not have time to do the main thing. And the most offensive thing is that this phenomenon cannot even be called laziness, because we work from morning to late evening. Sociologists have found that all over the world, regardless of nationality, 20% of the population suffers from the problem of accumulating work "for later."

Do not think that all these people are hoping to avoid the consequences of "postponing" and simply do not want to change, because they are happy with everything in life. Far from it! Each of them suffers from this state of affairs, worries, but cannot mobilize in any way. And the calls of others to him, like "stop suffering nonsense!" or “start working!” have zero effect, just like requests to “smile and not lose heart” to a person experiencing deep depression. It is not for nothing that chronic procrastination is defined by experts as a mechanism for dealing with anxiety. It is caused by a hidden psychological and physiological illness.

There are two forms in its course: active and passive. The active type simply waits until the last moment when he has a desire or inspiration to do the necessary work. He can swear that there just wasn't the right idea or impulse to get started. The passive type justifies its failure to fulfill or the unimportant performance of the task by the fact that there was little time, the deadlines were running out (keeping silent about who delayed these deadlines ?!), repeating: "Well, if initially they gave me more time, then I …" …

Psychologists have been researching this problem for a long time, trying to find out what criteria provoke the development of procrastination and how you can help cope with it. For example, a researcher from the University of Chicago, Joe Ferrari, found that ordinary time management does not help to overcome procrastination, because putting off things for tomorrow does not arise because of the inability to manage your time, but because of the tendency to avoid long-term projects and … the elementary habit of postponing completing the assignment.

He saw the initial roots of the problem in the childhood of the subjects. More than 80% of them were brought up in strict families and did not have the opportunity to defend their opinions in front of their parents. Therefore, in order to maintain some autonomy and the right to their opinion, they are used to postponing in time the fulfillment of parental requirements and, as it were, passively resist excessive pressure from them. However, the psychologist at the University of Munster, Fred Rist, believes that only in 10% of cases the family affects the formation of procrastination, and in 90% of cases, the problem of setting priorities in setting tasks and answering the question: why do other things become more important for me? He has developed a whole program to help his patients get rid of procrastination.

The program begins with realizing how important it is to establish specific points of no return for yourself, i.e. the moment from which it is necessary to begin to act. To do this, you need to learn how to realistically plan the time for completing the task. At the beginning of therapy, at least 20 minutes should be spent on the task per day: you cannot complete the task before and after the appointed time.

Only when a person learns to manage 20 minutes of his time per day, then gradually he will be able to expand these time boundaries to 6 - 8 hours a day. This is how the ability to establish control over time is achieved. The next steps in this program are skills: - always make a list of tasks to complete; - break down large tasks into small tasks that are easier and easier to complete; - to plan time for execution with a margin, accepting, as an axiom, that any task execution takes much more time than we assume; - set a specific deadline for starting activities, eliminating various interference in the form of phone calls, messages, viewing the weather forecast, etc.; - find yourself a workplace where no one can disturb.

There is also such an approach - (10 + 2) x5, where the idea is this: first you need to set yourself a task, for example, write a paragraph of text. Then, honestly, without being distracted, do this for 10 minutes (you can use a stopwatch!), Then do anything for 2 minutes: drink tea, look out the window, find out the weather forecast on Mars; then start all over again. Thus, by the end of the hour, five paragraphs of text suddenly appear out of nowhere.

Not a bad start !!! Moving on such a schedule every day, you can enter a rhythm that harmoniously "absorbs" all tasks postponed until tomorrow.

So, gradually a person learns:

1. Form a schedule in advance.

2. Hang it in frequently visited places: in the toilet, on the refrigerator or computer.

3. Fitting into the schedule is the hardest task.

4. Connect those close to doing easier tasks.

5. Highlight PRIORITIES without going too far.

6. Strike a balance between “do not do today what can be done tomorrow” and “do not put off until tomorrow what can be done today”.

We must hurry slowly, otherwise perfectionism will destroy the soul! Although I personally find it difficult to imagine what will happen in the world if the entire population of the Earth stops procrastinating. The world as we know it will cease to exist.

In addition, the bosses will suddenly find out that everything we do can be done twice as fast. What will happen next: GDP will double or the global crisis will resolve ?!

Surely no one knows and everyone has their own little discoveries. Whether to postpone the beginning of a new life until Monday or to do it right now - decide for yourself. But “doing nothing” should also have a place in our life. A pause helps to hear the big world and take a break from the eternal hustle and bustle. Laziness is not a vice, but only a way to avoid problems.