Ok, I admit it. I'm absolutely horrible at keeping my priorities in proper order. I'm willing to guess that you are too. Why? Because most humans are. It's sort of our nature.
You might not be as bad as I am or you might be much worse. Either way, we all have issues keeping our priorities in check in the face of a new "urgent" issue.
This morning my buddy Marcel Chastain pointed me to a blog that I've never read before. It's called Rock Your Day and it's written by a guy named Dave Navarro (no, not the musician.)
It's a very well written blog and has a lot of good motivational and entrepreneurial content. The very first article I read was his latest post titled: How To Keep Urgency From Ruining Your Life
I'll give you the real short version quickly, but I really recommend you read his post!
The article talks about ways to keep your goals and priorities in order even when a new "urgent" issue pops up. Yes, sometimes a seriously urgent issue does come out of now where. Maybe your dog got hit by a car or your kid is sick at school and you have to run and pick them up. Those are understandable.
A lot of times a new urgency is really just an excuse to avoid doing work that makes us uncomfortable. Humans are naturally afraid of rejection and look at failure as a form of rejection. So say something as easy as writing an email trying to sell something to your list, you'll put it off forever because you're afraid to fail.
That's a basic example but honestly it could be anything. Maybe you think it will be too hard or you'd rather browse YouTube for a while. There are a million reasons to move your days priorities around and trust me, I've used nearly all million of them.
In the article Dave talks about writing down your days goals EVERY morning on an index card on your desk. It's not so much having the card sitting there staring at you that helps, but it's the act of performing the exercise EVERY SINGLE DAY.
This is something I've recently started doing (even before reading this article) in my own life. I actually have been doing this daily on a white board next to my desk in big red letters.
What brought it on was me trying to juggle way to many tasks at once. When I start a project that shouldn't take me longer than 1 week to complete and it's taking me almost 3 weeks to really finish, it's a huge problem!
So far the daily exercise has been working well for me. I'm still trying to get myself back into a normal routine. Especially when it comes to working out (you know, physical exercise.) I've been spending so much time in front of my laptop that I haven't been working out the way I used to even as recent as 3 months ago.
I'm working on it though! Don't worry — I'll get there, that's for sure.
How do you procrastinate and avoid doing the days truly important work? How do you get past the procrastination and actually get your shit done? Leave some tips in the comments of this post.