Yesterday I discussed with my daughter my priorities, she was very insightful in helping me realise they were:

  1. Family
  2. School
  3. Art
  4. Internet Marketing

She’s a smart cookie.  At the time I was wondering which task I should do first, a) Learning my internet marketing or b) get prepared for school work tomorrow or c) Contact arts buyers.

Looking at the degrees of importance and general urgency we came up with the above ‘priority list’. It helped me tick off – what does my family need? What does school need? What does my art need? What can I do on internet marketing? I realised if I could ensure higher priorities were met I could then continue on with other activities stress and guilt free.

Procrastination.

I was listening to a long lost time management MP3 when this really helpful tip beating on procrastination hit me. The presenter said:

Procrastination is simply a condition where you are not experiencing enough pain to force you to do something and not enough pleasure to urge you to do it anyway

Actually that might have been a Tony Robbins speech. Anyways the next point was even better:

‘You need to train yourself out of procrastination by rewarding any action with an immediate reward, often with a very small but enjoyable reward that you would do yourself anyway. I.e eat a treat, brush your hair, go for a run, go on facebook for 1min timed!’

The point was we already reward ourselves when we DON’T do something. Instead of doing something that needs to be done, we go and eat, have a shower or read an email. Our minds assume we are rewarding ourselves for NOT doing something which creates a stronger habit.

So at this very moment I would love to go for a shower, but I won’t, not until I’ve done this daily blog post. And you know what it’s working, today. So treat yourself, AFTER you’ve done that thing you need to do!

Also, I’m trialing some time management software that was recommended by Mark Ling. It’s free and in a few moments I’m going to check off this thing I’ve done!

Clockingit Free Online Time Management.

Ciao. Samith Pich.