The brilliant meme above by Instachaaz captures the turmoil of people about time management. The Ever Given ship that was stuck in the Suez canal had sparked this idea. Procrastination is the biggest obstacle to personal productivity. Procrastination is real! We are humans and not computers that continue working, once powered on. At the root of any procrastination, there is just one thing – the lack of clarity about the work under question.
The work looks daunting as it is new, and it is so big that you don’t know whether you would ever finish it even if you start now. The answer lies in getting clarity about how to make at least a little progress on the work, without worrying about the whole problem.
Also, sometimes a smoothly running work just stops and does not progress and you start wondering why you are procrastinating to take it up. The reason should always be, again, not knowing a next doable action to make progress on it.
As you get clarity by means of figuring out the first or next doable action, the fear and so the procrastination should go away.
The real hurdle in getting clarity is a natural aversion of our mind to do the slow thinking as it requires the application of deliberate effort and energy. This effort or energy is not as large as one would think, so being conscious about this fact should help one to try.
A nice tool to find suitable doable actions on any work is mind map. A mind map encourages you to do slow thinking. Thus as you build a mind map you get a whole lot of possibilities to make inroads into a seemingly intractable work.
Next time you do procrastination about something, think of getting clarity and proceed to a mind map tool.
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