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Procrastination and Prognostication - Throw Away Your Crystal Ball and Get Into Action

No one really knows what the future holds yet we all have concocted fantasies of the future that we convince ourselves will come true. Unfortunately, many of these scenarios are tragedies. Procrastination is the way you avoid that negative future.

What are you afraid will happen if you finish painting the bedroom, writing a report, sending thank you notes, or getting the car repaired? The immediate reply is usually, “Nothing. I will feel wonderful.” You realize that the thing you are putting off or not finishing is so simple or easy to do that you are stumped about why you are procrastinating.

You may be surprised to discover that it is not the present project that is the problem. This problem is simply a smoke screen that hides the real problem… what comes next. Consider these examples.

In one of my workshops a woman declared that her goal was to clean out her desk by the end of the month. Nothing could be easier. Once she uncovered her fears of the future she announced, “If I clean out my desk I will have to clean up my life. And I might have to divorce my husband!” No wonder she wasn’t able to get her desk in order. What was waiting for her after that was too scary to contemplate. What does a desk have to do with a marriage?

Another participant, a young man who had graduated college a year before, kept putting off taking the exam for graduate school. He was at a loss to motivate himself even though he knew that he needed and wanted a graduate degree to get ahead in his career. He got in touch with the fear that if he went to graduate school he would be around others who shared his interests and might find someone more exciting than his wife. Once he named his fear he was able to challenge his twisted thinking and realized that he could be around interesting people and still choose to come home to his loving spouse.

A young mother in my class was frantic because she was moving to a new home in two weeks and couldn’t make herself pack up all the things in her garage. She was paralyzed and puzzled. What came to light was that she and her husband had been discussing having more children. She wanted another baby but her husband did not. In the garage were boxes with her son’s baby clothes, ready for the next infant. She told herself that if she gave away his clothes it meant that she would never have another child. She unconsciously stopped herself from clearing the garage so that bleak future would not happen. After confronting her fear she realized that she could still have a baby in the future, even if she no longer had the baby clothes.

You have no crystal ball that can predict the future! Your dreaded fears may not materialize. Therefore, acting as if you were 100% sure of disaster and creating stress by trying to avoid your fantasy of unhappiness will surely lead to pain and misery. What are you afraid will happen in the future if you tackle the project you have been putting off? Write down your worst fear and face it now.

Gloria Arenson is a Licensed Marriage ad Family Therapist. She is the author of How to Stop Playing the Weighting Game, Born to Spend, Five Simple Steps to Emotional Healing, Freedom At Your Fingertips, and Procrastination Nation. For more information go to http://www.GloriaArenson.com

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2008 08 01 admin Time Management Comments (0) Permalink

Five Tips on Increasing Productivity

How’s your productivity lately?

Information overload is a real problem that we have to deal with. We check our emails every five seconds. Our mobile phones beep like sirens every five minutes. The internet calls out to us like the sea and meetings are called almost every week. Whew! How can we ever catch up with everything?

The result? Backlogs pile up at the office. Bosses shouting orders at us to finish things ASAP! Don’t you ever wish we are still living in the pre-mobile phone era?

Productivity suffers as a result of too much information that we have to deal with. Here are five tips on increasing productivity in this age of information overload.

1. Wake up early. Mornings are magical. When you see the darkness rolled away by the light, you can almost smell the dew. If you’re not the sentimental type, you can always start your day right away and start banging away at your keyboard or do your morning rituals briefly before working.

2. Write down the tasks for the day. Go get your Smartphone or your old fashioned organizer and list down the things you need to do for the day. It doesn’t have to be very elaborate as long as you can list down everything. I usually write down everything because if I don’t, I risk forgetting about them.

3. Prioritize your to-do list. When you have listed down your tasks, arrange them according to significance. Put routine tasks at the bottom of the list because they are the ones requiring less thinking and attention. Prioritize urgent matters, followed by the important ones, and the routine tasks come last.

4. Work on one task after another. Whoever popularized multi-tasking should be punished. Just kidding. There’s a limit to what you can do effectively. To maximize your attention span and your work flow. Do one thing after another. This way, you are less likely to be distracted by other work.

5. Keep your mobile phone away from you and do not sign on to online Instant Messengers. Unless you are on call, keep your mobile away from you. Likewise, if instant messengers are not really necessary in doing your job, you might as well not sign in. SMS and instant messengers are two of the top distractions at work. If you don’t want to be disturbed by them. Just keep them off your desk.

Your job is important to you. Delivering your work output everyday is crucial. By increasing your productivity, you are contributing to the success of your company.

M Rasing is a blogger and freelance writer who is always on the lookout for tips on personal development. For more articles on personal development, what to do at the crossroads and help in your life journey, visit Mighty’s blog at http://bemightynow.penstalker.com

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2008 07 24 admin Time Management Comments (0) Permalink

The Best Ways For Time Management

How much time do you need for a day? Do you wish to have more time for a day? If you do not have enough time, what would be the best possible problem?

If you want to know a revelation about time, it is this. Everyone, it does not matter if you are a CEO of a listed company or the fellow sweeping the floor, has 24 hours a day.

If a CEO of a listed company has the ability to get so many things done within 24 hours, why can’t you? Someone even said, the busiest person on earth actually has time to do everything.

It is all about time management.

Time is very valuable to all of us. It is even more valuable than money. Ask yourself this question. Would it be easier for you to give money or give time? If you need to save the time, you would not mind paying extra for time.

Since time is so valuable to everyone of us, what are the best ways to manage your time? Here are a few things you can do.

Do It Now 
Procrastination is the number one killer of success. You know you should do it, you know you need to do it but you keep putting it off. “I’ll do it later”.

When you need to write a 200-page report, you get yourself prepared like cleaning the table, getting a hot coffee, wear the most comfortable shirt, have the best working environment and finally said, “I’ll do it tomorrow!”.

Does that sound familiar to you? Why is this happening? It is because human being rarely think by logic. They are often driven by emotion.

The difference that makes the successful people to get so many things done is that, they choose to do it anyway. They do feel overwhelmed too but they choose to bring down the great wall and once they have done that, their motivation comes.

Plan Ahead 
Often when you do not have a plan, you will be driven by unnecessary tasks. This means you will be wasting a lot more time doing things that are not related to the final outcome you desire.

It is like building a house without having a floor plan. You can simply build a house without planning on how you want to have it built. If you do, the chances are you will find a lot of errors and eventually you will spend a lot more time correcting your mistakes.

It is the same in everything that you do in life. Before you start a business, before you market a product or even before you go for a holiday. If it is not planned, the chances are your journey can be adventurous yet time wasting.

Consequence of Not Having Time Management 
This works really well and this only happens to people who realize that they need more time and improvement. Some people just do not think they need more time.

What did it cost you in the past when you did not plan your time well? Maybe you kept putting an assignment off until the very last minute of the submission date. Maybe you could be thinking there is still a plenty of time left and you do not see the need of starting to work on the project yet.

As a result of it, you did not score in your assignment or your manager rejected the project you have done because it was not of the quality one.

When you know what it has cost you to lose, you will begin to use your time more effectively and eventually you will waste no time in everything that you do.

Discover how you can manage your time like the Great Successful People so that you can achieve much more in a given short period of time. For more articles on Personal Excellence, Motivation, Success and Development, please visit The Excellence Blog of mine.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Clement_Chee
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2008 07 15 admin Time Management Comments (0) Permalink

3 Basic Personal Time Management Skills That You Must Know

Congratulation for reading this article as you are one of the top ten percent of the population who are taking action to improve their time management skills. Why do you what to improve your time management skills? Is it because of you are overwhelm with your study, your office works or your household works or others? Anthony Robbins said the reason for doing something is much stronger than whatever methods or skills that you are going to learn. Therefore, list down as many reasons as possible before you continue.

Know Your Goals and Objectives

Just imagine you are blindfolded and are required to hit a target with a set of arrows. Do you able to hit the target? Without able to see the target, you have to play with guessing. You have to try many times and are considered very lucky if you ever able hit the target. This is the same in real life if you do not set any goals. You will be wasting your time, trying to figure out your destination. You must set goals in every aspect of your life, such as careers, family, financial, health and extra, as time management is actually life management. Once you have set the goals, visualize the most interesting scenery, the sound or the feeling of the end result when you have achieved them.

Planning and Prioritizing

You need to list down all the steps, plan and prioritize them. If the goals are very huge, break them down into smaller and manageable pieces. This skill is important as you do not want to de-motivate or overwhelm yourself by seeing big goals. Put these steps in your to-do-list. Allow at least 30 percent to 50 percent of buffer time to cater for any emergency or any unexpected events which are unavoidable. Work according to the items in your to-do list as closely as possible till completion. You will feel great satisfaction once you have completed the tasks as per your to-do list. You should be able to complete your tasks much faster in a less stressful way.

Review and Reinvest Your Extra Time

Create a time log and record down your activities on hourly basis. Set one hour at the end of the day to review it. Ask yourself have you making the best use of your allocated time for the day? Is there any activity that you can improve or eliminate or delegate it to others? You should be able to identify any time wasters from it. By regularly reviewing and improving your time usage, you should be able to save at least one hour per day. Reinvest the extra one hour in life long learning, which can further improve your productivity, career, financial, health, family relationship or any other aspects of your life.

Once you have mastered these skills, try to further improve your personal time management skill by picking up another time management tactic from books or seminars and practice it. Always allow certain time period to test the effectiveness of the new skill before making conclusion on the skill. Since time is so valuable, it is worthwhile to invest some time to improve the usage of it.

Lawrence Ng. 
For limited time only, you can learn more effective personal time management skills by visiting this websitehttp://www.managecontroltime.com

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2008 07 10 admin Time Management Comments (0) Permalink

Decision - The Chess Board of Life

 

Do it. Do it right. Do it right now.

Life is a game of chess, the player opposite you is Old Father Time. Time is an opponent that stalks its prey with stealth and cunning. You may think that everything is fine and by staying upon the neutral ground of indecision that you are upon safe ground, but those who fail to act will get left behind. Time waits for no man and is no respecter of persons. On the chess board of life time will corner those guilty of hesitation until they are out of options, forced into check mate.

It has taken me 21 years to realise that procrastination is one of lifes easiest and greatest evils. Failure to master to procrastination will result in a huge pile of regrets. Napoleon Hill wrote ‘Indecision and procrastination are twins. Where one is found the other may usually be found also. Kill off this pair before they completely tie you to the treadmill of failure’. You can not stand still in time, everything in the whole universe is in either a state of growth or decay, including your body and the quality of your life, nothing remains inactive or static. So if you are not growing, then you are in fact decaying. Either flow with the current by making the best use of your time or risk finding yourself stuck in an unpleasant life, where your options have been severely reduced.

Time can be a great advantage to those who use it, time used wisely will bring everything that is needed.

The problem is the illusion of time. There really is no such thing. When did you ever live next week? Or experience next year? You didn’t, you only ever experience, ‘NOW’. Tomorrow never comes, its simply the eternal, rolling, ever present, constant moment of now. That’s all you experience, all you can experience. When this realisation is made the benefits are phenomenal. You are in control, you know that if you need to make a change the only time to make that change is now, for now is the only time it can happen. You must change now, so that your future experience of the ‘now’, is a better one.

If you have dreams start today, with a definiteness of purpose that you will achieve them, anything less will only reap lesser results. It was John Lennon who said ‘Life is what happens whilst we are making other plans’. Don’t let life pass you by, follow your plans through, take action now.

Decide! Fortune favours those who make decisions promptly.

Don’t wait until next week to start a diet and lose weight. Get down the gym now. It is only through lack of decision in exercise and disciplined eating that got you fat in the first place. 
The girl across the room at the party you want to talk to, just round up your shoulders and do it! Don’t be the guy who bottles it and ten minutes later watches her leaving with another guy, who did have the courage to make his mind up.

If you have an entrepreneurial idea, do not waver! Go right ahead put your idea into action. Or else run the risk of staying in that 9-5, job you hate, for the rest of your life.

This is not doom and gloom. I suppose my writing may have come across slightly more negative than usual but it is because I have been stung by this one. I am trying very hard now to master my time and be true decision maker, some missed opportunities have been because although I wanted them, I never quite truly decided, at least not enough for them to crystallize. But the mastery of decision making is a gift and so rewarding, it separates the men from the boys, the wheat from the chaff. Time taken advantage of and used correctly will profit you no end, and there is plenty of it too. Any endeavour you have in mind there is ample time to achieve it, but you must make a start today.

Choose today,

Hesitate and consign yourself to limited options, due to your neglect decisions will be made for you

or

Be the master of your own mind, make your own decisions, and be free.

By Joey Bushnell

Joey Bushnell - http://knowers-ark.com/decisionschess.aspx

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2008 06 15 admin Time Management Comments (0) Permalink