Help - Procrastination - GTD

[pdnewbie]

I'll get right to it. I have been procrastinating on a project (finding a job after graduating), and I believe I should be working on it, but I'm not. It's really important to me that I at least work for a while for that experience in exercising personal productivity, and social competencies, in the workplace. GTD recommends that you keep the calendar for such things as agendas, meetings, appointments, and the like. I would like some suggestions on beating this procrastination. Would imposing deadlines on myself help? How would this work in the GTD environment.

Note that I've only recently set up my organiser, and I've still got some GTD restructuring to do on my desktop.

Thanks to everyone in advance

[Alvin]

Hi pdnewbie!

Has there been a time in your life when you procrastinated, and then you got yourself cranking? What did you do then that worked for you?

[pdnewbie]

There were a few times where I was getting myself cranking after procrastinating. It was out of frustration for the number of times I would cram for assignments at the last minute. I was setting weekly goals of what I wanted to achieve. That helped for a while.

Temptations to resign (excuses?) influenced my behaviour and ultimately I didn't get the outcomes I was hoping for. I must admit, my motivator for effort is usually external, rather than internal (eg., time pressure, how well someone else lays out the task ahead of me).

I should revisit the goal setting concept in greater detail, but I'm waiting for a chance to borrow out 'First things first' in the library. I could look around in Steve's blog.

Thanks Alvin, for asking the question.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks in advance,

pdnewbie.

[Alvin]

Sometimes, it's easiest just to look back and see what you've done that's worked for you in the past to overcome this bit, and keep doing more of the same

[Trustme]

I recommend the book "The Now Habit". I really got some great insights into procrastionation from this book.

[RT Wolf]

I also recommend a book-- The Sixty Second Procrastinator. Pavlina recommended it and I picked it up from the libary a few weeks ago. Some great tips in there. If you find yourself procrastinating, just pick one.

Another thing I use is to ask myself why i'm procrastinating. Answering that question honestly takes some time, but I usually find it's because of fear of something or just fear of discomfort. Good luck!

[Trustme]

Originally Posted by RT Wolf

Another thing I use is to ask myself why i'm procrastinating. Answering that question honestly takes some time, but I usually find it's because of fear of something or just fear of discomfort. Good luck!

or perfectionism
I found out that many times I don't start something because I just haven't found the perfect way to do it. I read that lots of messies (people whose houses/flats look like a waste dump) are perfectionists who just don't start organizing things because they can't live with the fact that they can't do it perfectly.

For example I kept stashes of invoices at home because I couldn't make up my mind how and in what format to file them.

What helped me in these regard is timeboxing and the 21day trials/challenges (eg. work 15 minutes every day on this project).