Musings of the Museless » Excel http://www.lorihogan.com Fri, 14 May 2010 01:54:38 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 Procrastination and Elephants http://www.lorihogan.com/2006/04/10/procrastination-and-elephants/ http://www.lorihogan.com/2006/04/10/procrastination-and-elephants/#comments Mon, 10 Apr 2006 19:51:00 +0000 Lori http://www.lorihogan.com/wordpress/?p=143 From previous posts, you may have gotten the notion that I am a little stressed or depressed. And I’m not going to disagree. But I have been doing a deal of research on depression, procrastination and the effects of one on the other (while procrastinating on some other stuff :P). No, seriously. Did you know “we” (humans, primates, whomever) usually procrastinate when we think the job is too easy OR because we think it’s too hard? We don’t want to admit our faults, so by not starting… People also tend to procrastinate on one task if they think they will be asked to do something else once they’ve completed the first task. I’m guilty of procrastinating for all of the above reasons.

My new philosophy/goal is to not procrastinate. I’m the Queen of Prioritizing (via Excel spreadsheets, usually) but am hopeless at following through with the things on my list I think are too easy/hard/etc. But as a wise man once said, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!”. I’m approaching every task/job, be it housework, workwork, thesiswork or volunteerwork, in terms of small tasks, capable of being completed in minutes or hours.

Thus far it’s working well for me. Got a lot of house tasks accomplished this weekend. I did well today at work, especially considering it’s Monday. I know it’s not a perfect solution, but it’s managable. I’ll take it for now.

Four more sleeps….

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