50minutes - Beat Procrastination For Good: Change your habits and start getting things done

At this stage, all you have to do is define your goals. To do this, you will need to draw up four lists. Spend no more than 30 minutes on this exercise.

Make a list, in no particular order, of the things you would like to do, but continually put off. Include both personal and professional tasks, without worrying about how important they are. For example:

• file the bills from the last six months,
• sew the button back on my coat,
• organise a regional meeting,
• update my CV,
• telephone five potential new clients,
• prepare my sales presentation, set for ten days from now,
• clear out and tidy my cellar,
• change the tyre on my bike,
• fix my bookshelves,
• make a doctors appointment.

As you can see, this type of list includes both large tasks with major consequences and minor tasks which have relatively little impact. The important thing is not to try to put them in any kind of order; just jot down anything that comes to mind without beating yourself up about it.

Next, select the ten tasks that you consider most important (if you have fewer than ten to start with, even better!) and quickly analyse the inconveniences that come with putting them off. Thinking about these negative effects and writing them down will help you to identify sources of motivation and establish your priorities. You should describe the inconveniences very precisely, as in the table below.

Transform this table by picturing your situation once you have completed the ten tasks. Think Once I have finished this task, I will get the following benefit from it rather than If I finished this task, I would get the following benefit from it. This simple rewording exercise will allow you to change your attitude.

Now think about the things in your environment that encourage your tendency to put things off until tomorrow and pick four elements that you can act on. Next, decide to do something to eliminate each distraction. For example:

You can use the Eisenhower Matrix to select your five priority actions. This method was inspired by the former US president Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), who reportedly once said I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent. The matrix therefore allows us to classify our tasks based on the criteria of urgency and importance; you will soon see how useful it is to distinguish between the two. The two criteria are represented on the two axes of the following graph: urgency is on the horizontal axis, and importance is on the vertical axis.

Go back to the unsorted list of the things you would like to do but have not got around to and place each of the tasks in one of the boxes of the matrix. Once you have done this, the top left-hand box will be your priority list: it contains everything that is both important and urgent. The good news is that you can abandon all the tasks in the not important and not urgent box for good! If all your tasks are in the important and urgent box, start again and think harder about each task to rank them in order of importance and degree of urgency.

You should be left with a short list (no more than five tasks) to carry out quickly. The most decisive stage is done, because you have now precisely defined your objectives. You have gone from I have so many things to do that I am not doing to I have identified five important, urgent tasks that I am going to complete. You have taken a constructive step.

E XAMPLE OF A PRIORITY LIST

1. Organise a meeting with the Dumont Company to review the past year and offer new services for the coming year.
2. Finish my revenue forecast by client and by month.
3. Tidy my desk and throw away or archive half my papers.
4. Set up a meeting with the IT technician to update my computer.
5. Update my CV.