Procrastination.
That dreaded P word that made you laugh in school due to it’s similarity to, ahem, an all together different activity.
It can be said that entrepreneurs suffer from procrastination more than anybody else. Employees, at the very least, have somebody who will look over their shoulder at the end of the day to ask if they’ve finished the report, or faxed the documents.
What do we have?
Typical lifestyle entrepreneurs, as we often refer to ourselves, have all the time in the world to get the ‘big things’ done.
Whether that’s your one, two, or three key things you’ve given yourself to get done that day, or your next blog post highlighting how productive you are becoming, we all have as much time as we need.
Despite everything pointing in our favour, we don’t use this time to our best advantage.
Before we know it we’ve spent two hours diving in and out of Twitter, retweeting cool posts, having brief conversations with strangers, and damn near wasting our whole morning.
I was thinking about this a while back, and while doing so I remembered something Tim Ferriss said in the 4HWW.
I only read the sections of a book that are relevant to immediate next steps. Unnecessary reading is public enemy number one. [paraphrased]
All too often I will find myself reading all the material I can on a topic before I even begin to think about starting anything.
Tim’s book is a great example of this.
I read the book through twice and highlighted it within an inch of its life, and placed colour-coordinated post-it note bookmarks all over it before I even though about ways in which I could implement advice given within the book.
It’s fair to say that the majority of the things I am working on right now I know up to a fairly high level. I know exactly what I will do when I get to one point or another – but the truth is, in all the time I’ve spent working this stuff out (or, procrastinating, as it will now be known), I could have been actually doing the damn things I’d been meticulously reading about!
Don’t fool yourself. Just because what you’re doing right now doesn’t feel like procrastination (after all, you’re not getting poked while you tweet) it doesn’t mean you’re using your time in the best possible way.
Sure, it’s important to know what’s around the corner, but it’s more important to know what you’ve got to do right now and to just get on and do it.
I spend months and months of my life procrastinating last year. Hell, I’ve spend months procrastinating this year. You’ve got to just get on with it, do the work and cross those scary bridges when you come to them.
###
| Tweet
|