#57 Why we procrastinate on the big stuff and how to fix it

I’ve got a lovely long list of stuff to do. Some of these things have been on my list since the start of the year. And the only reason I don’t have stuff from lurking on it from last year is that I, ahem, started a new list on the first of January.

The list isn’t full of little tasks like ‘take the bin out’ and ‘phone the vet’. I wish it was. Instead it’s a catalogue of great projects for my business. Stuff that I want to do but have been too busy to get round to.

Or have I?

Maybe not.

In my other life (where I work with management teams on strategic stuff for biggish businesses) it’s always been glaringly obvious that when people are ‘too busy’ to do their big projects it’s not really because they’ve got too much on but rather because they:

• don’t think the project is that important, or
• they don’t know where to start

On Monday while I was admonishing a team (as I am want to do, in my best school teacherly way) for using ‘busy’ as an excuse I got hit with a terrible feeling that I was, in fact, the pot calling the kettle black.

Didn’t I always reason to myself (and tell anyone else who’d listen) that I was too busy to get on with my own fabulous list of projects?

So when I got home I took a dose of my own medicine, got out my long list and marked each project with an X for “It was a good idea at the time but now not important” and a ‘?’ for “Want to do it but it seems so big I don’t know where to start”.

And then it was all easy.

The Xs got binned and the ‘?’s – well in the spirit of ‘every journey starts with a single step’ it really wasn’t that hard for me to just figure out the first thing to do.

So that’s got my list dealt with. How’s yours looking?

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