A Simple Technique to Overcome Procrastination

From JimGibbon:

One Simple Technique to Help You Overcome Procrastination and Start Writing Now

August 5th, 2006 | Productivity

For the last three weeks I’ve been using something called “contingency management” to write more, and more consistently, than at any point in my entire life. I now write an average of three pages a day (typed, double-spaced) during one 30-minute session. I’ve also used this technique to jump start two projects that were stalled for months.

Only a small fraction of my writing would be publishable, but I now have over 60 pages of new ideas, hunches, questions, and possible solutions that simply didn’t exist a month ago. On top of everything, I no longer cringe when I think about writing and my self-confidence has skyrocketed.

Contingency management has been around for years, but I just learned about it in a great book by Robert Boice called Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing. This is required reading for writers in all fields who want to overcome the inertia of writer’s block and procrastination. Continue reading “A Simple Technique to Overcome Procrastination”

Component/Fundamental #4 — Acting Now v2

During the act of Emptying, the user often discovers that a number of time demands can be completed with only a 2-5 minute burst of immediate activity.

Definition

Acting Now means taking immediate action on items that have been emptied from a capture point. For example, a friend’s new phone number can be entered immediately into a contact database of phone numbers within 60 seconds.

The easiest course of action for some time demands is to deal with them immediately, rather than to go through a longer process of entering them into a list, or into a schedule.

Also, there are occasions, in which taking immediate action leads to other actions, and care must be taken to deal with these follow-up items by either capturing them, or placing them in the time management system.

Principles

Act on as many items that can be acted on now as time will allow. Continue reading “Component/Fundamental #4 — Acting Now v2”