A personal productivity toolkit
K5 has a neat article on procrastination with a lot of decent tips on behavior modification. The author also lists GTD as further reading and quotes Csikszentmihalyi, so he’s totally on my team.
He also links to a cool new homepage he has designed for us who are in the sad position of doing work @online.
January 20th, 2005 at 22:35
IMHO, The comments after this article are just as insightful. I typically think of procastination of a sign that something isn’t quite right about what you are doing. Are you having second thoughts about the task or the objective you are moving towards? The trick is being able to interpret those hesitations not as a weakness but as a leading indicator that something isn’t going to work. Your job is to figure out what it is. The only thing I can liken it to is man walking out of the gym after a punishing workout. He’s starving and could eat the arse out of a skunk. A rookie will hear that hunger and fill himself up with whatever is handy. The veteran listens to his body. Maybe it wants meat (lots of protein), maybe it screams for pasta (carbs), maybe it wants a Coke (carbs, and fast). I’ve heard Tai Chi enthusiasts talk about walking through a grocery store after an intense session and feel like their body was guiding them to specific items. In sum, don’t discount your internal sources, even if they get in the way of what you think productivity should be. Take the cues, adapt, improve and move beyond that artificial productivity. Be super productive now.
January 20th, 2005 at 22:54
nice post