When do you Make Your Time Count?

In a previous post, we emphasized “Time is Money but Time to think is Gold” and we added that quick decision-making in order to gain time and money makes us lose money compared to taking time to think and then decide. We are expected to make decisions on a daily basis and on the smallest things in our lives at the office or at home. But once we decide on doing something and we start by setting deadlines we put ourselves in a stressful situation where we see that by procrastinating we feel better off and relieved from this stress. Browsing Facebook, watching TV, or spending more time with the staff in the break room drinking coffee when we feel that a deadline is approaching is a sort of stress break from a big responsibility that we have to do. We procrastinate and see others procrastinating on daily basis and we’ve always done that since studying at school.

Procrastination as we know it and as we’ve always been told about is destructive because it keeps up from getting our responsibilities done by not being able to allocate the right amount of time to completely and perfectly accomplish them. Some consider that there are two types of procrastination; destructive procrastination and productive procrastination. Productive procrastination is when you procrastinate your most important tasks and make yourself busy with other less stressful yet productive tasks. For example, destructive procrastination is when you surf Facebook or do nothing instead of doing the most important activity first. Productive procrastination is when you do other less important but required things instead of doing the most important activities first. And while many consider that productive procrastination is good because it helps you accomplish many tasks, it is still keeping you from tackling the most important activities first; and therefore productive procrastination should also be avoided when possible.

To stop procrastination, we usually start by revealing the motif and the benefit we have to accomplish the job. We resume by subdividing the activity in chunks that we set a timer for completing each chunk. To avoid positive procrastination all less important activities should be delegated when they are not your responsibility (For example when an optometrist performs lens edging, it should be delegated to the optician).

Last but not least, the five-second rule by Mel Robbins works well for many, it tricks the brain into focusing on the goal that is about to happen. It’s like you’re waiting for NASA to launch a rocket or a space shuttle, you start counting 5-4-3-2-1, and then you do it.