Do you ever get so frustrated at yourself for not doing a task that it just kills your productivity for the rest of the day? As a simple example let’s take cleaning the house, you know it has to be done at some point but instead you just sit on the couch for an hour looking at the mess and by the time you snap out of your own day dreaming you realise that it all could have been finished in that hour if you just stopped procrastinating.
Achieving what you want to achieve is purely a mental game. You know you’re capable of doing what needs to be done but you put it off and procrastinate for whatever reason.
Even the things you are passionate about it doesn’t necessarily have to be some mundane task like cleaning the house you find a way to put them off.
I was frustrated at myself today. I want to get my Competition Resource Guide website up and running and at the minimum I want a solid 5 articles finished before I go live with it. I also want to sort out the email sign up form, complete a lead magnet PDF and an auto responder series that goes a long with the PDF.
They are the basics I need to get this website live. I have large plans including an online course and ebook to go with the website but currently that it what I want to achieve to get the website up and running and it also gives me a chance to implement my SEO knowledge and skills as well.
For reasons I can’t put my finger on yet, and I am going to work it out because it is frustrating me that these simple tasks constantly get put to the back of the to-do-list, and I have touched on this before when talked about Big Ticket Items Vs Small Wins and this is definitely one of those situations.
How I am going to address this issue?
Restructuring The Way I Set Goals
The way I am currently setting goals is daily with no real end target, I get through most of the daily tasks set often at the expense of the important big ticket items. I need to structure my goals so I have a monthly outcomes, weekly goals to reach that monthly outcome and daily tasks to help reach those weekly goals that contribute to the monthly outcome. That way I am always working towards a bigger goal and I have a weekly goal deadly to help contribute to the monthly outcome which means my daily tasks are more specific, there is a sense of urgency for the bigger ticket items and the small wins are still in my daily to-do-list but with less of a priority.
Perfectionist
I have had this problem all my life and I am only just starting to let go slightly to just get things done and worry about getting every little aspect up to scratch at later point.
I recently heard a new way to look at it. I can still be a perfectionist but I need to be a perfectionist at time management and not wasting my time. There is no point spending 12 hours on changing a small aspect of a website when you think of that amount of content you could have produced in that time.
Managing my time has to be a top priority and making sure I am getting the most out of the time I have available to me. Now that doesn’t mean occupying every second of my day, that is a sure fast way to burn yourself out fast. You need some time out to meditate and relax just as much as when you have set aside time to work you need to punch it out.
Winning The Mental Battle
Half the battle is just getting started, once you have started and the information starts to flow everything else is easy. It’s like getting up in the morning, rolling out of bed is often the hardest part but when you are up and ready to tackle the day it is all guns blazing! I need to become more efficient and just knowing what to do and just starting it straight away. I need to put in place better systems to be able to recognise these events.
Those are the 3 strategies I will be taking into this week. I am also posting this as a form of accountability as well. The more I put thing out there the more obligated I feel to complete them. So if you are reading this hit me up on twitter at @jimmydonline to see if I followed through with completing all those big ticket items I had planned.
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