We all know we have it, we can hear it sneering at us from the pile in the corner or the overstuffed drawer. It creeps in when you are not looking then slowly but surely does a small dance on the peaceful landscape of your mind.
Get enough dancing thoughts and you have a recipe for an overloaded and disorganised thought process.
I can feel it now, that little pile of letters sitting, unopened just doing a slow waltz around my head.
The shed, which I cannot even see from where I am sitting, is doing a highland fling around the waltzing couple, keeping time perfectly to distract my thoughts from the issues at hand.
Oh but there is a great TV program just coming on and I can just sit and watch it… or a look in the cupboard reveals a severe lack of chocolate and I should probably go to the shop!
Out of Sight
So we take our dancing duo with us, out of sight but certainly not out of mind.
They interfere with our thoughts at the shop – “I should probably buy a letter opener while I am here”, or “I need a new broom for the shed”.
These continuous thoughts are draining but also create within us all the feeling we are so very busy. Busy thinking about being busy!
The problem with thinking about things that need to be done is that it is like a car revving full out but not in gear.
All that power, that energy and yet nothing being accomplished. It’s time to take your thoughts down a notch, press the clutch and place it in an easy first gear ready for take off.
It may be a bit juddery when we start, but that is to be expected. The revving was easy, but it in no way shape or form gave us the knowledge on how to drive the car. That is the next step we need to take and it will be a new experience.
Thought Interference
It’s time to bust the procrastination bug.
Now I say that with a little tongue in cheek, because there is no bug, there is no tangible thing sitting on top of you – IT IS YOU AND IT IS ME! Simple as that. I
don’t need to analyse it or delve deeper into it – I just need to do it.
Brooks Palmer in Clutter Busting Your Life talks about the emotional baggage, and organising your stuff. However, after years of not doing it, there will be habits forming and that is the thing that must be changed!
Begin with a Minute
This is the ONE minute bust crunching solution!
For 1 minute, do one of those tasks you have been putting off and just thinking about.
Yes, really, for only 1 minute!
That doesn’t seem so hard does it?
Maybe the job was to iron all your shirts… No problem. Set the ironing board up, plug the iron in and iron for 1 minute.
This is all about changing our habits that have been forming and leading us to ‘think’ about the solution instead of acting on the solution.
We all know that for ironing to be finished, we need to iron, and we all know that we can think about the ironing for day or weeks and it still never gets done.
We don’t need to sort the whole pile papers in one go, we can sort them a minute at a time.
The shed won’t be done in a day, but a small corner could have been started and cleared.
You’ll see that this tiny reward will have you slowly disrupting the dancing thoughts in our heads. You may even feel a little that since you started, you may wish to do 2 or 5 or 10 minutes now you are doing the thing you have been procrastinating on.
Show Up – Rule 1
There is a rule to every success in life and that rule is number 1.
SHOW UP!
If I would have properly learned this lesson when I started writing many years ago I may have been better at writing posts and books.
Now I think that every day I make the effort to show up and write, even if it is for only 30 minutes, I am still showing up to the task, AND so can you!
Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Martin Luther King, even the Buddha, didn’t become the people they were and are today without showing up every single day and doing that little bit more.
I want us to live lives rich in experiences without the burden of stuff to think about.
The beauty of the one minute procrastinating busting technique is that soon you will be saying, if it’s only a minute, perhaps today I give 2.
Burning Heat and Salt Pans, oh what excitement! Salt pans, in the middle of the burning heat of the Orange Free state in South Africa, no I wouldn’t believe it… not unless I had seen it today with my own eyes. Areas of land, drying out to leave behind crystal white salt. The temperature here…
Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail. Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Emerson makes the point of perseverance, and as I wrote previously about it I want to give you the encouragement to continue to get up. It is failure that creates the necessity to invent!
It’s Thursday already. The week has been flying past and I have been busy – I know I have been busy but there is a growing list of to-dos on my right side and I seem to not even notice the light anymore. It’s Thursday and I need to prioritise! Today I thought it’s time…
Ever caught yourself saying, “I’ll do that later’, or “Maybe next year”? That is exactly what I woke up to the realisation of this morning. I cannot say that I will do something later and in effect place some form of credit in the time bank! It just cannot work. You see, time is a…
I am an Existentialist! What a strange statement to make! Who really cares about what I am? I care, and I am interested to know what you are! We all have outlooks in life. Some are tinted by a religious belief, others have thick blinkers on to avoid looking around. If anything, being a something…
Gather them, Gather them all together! It is apparent that procrastination is happening in many areas of our lives. From the visible (washing up) to the less visible (paperwork, life decisions, and ignoring the credit card bill!). However, each has it’s own measure of mental fatigue!
