Special help for procrastinators

27 April 2017

Do you procrastinate on certain tasks? I used to be a dyed-in-the-wool procrastinator. When I was a freelance writer, I waited until the last minute to work on my magazine articles. Heck, I didn’t even start writing my very first book (in 1999) until the day after Thanksgiving and it was due on January 2! Take it from me, that’s nothing to be proud of.

Now, as an organizer, I’m less of a procrastinator, thank goodness. But there are still tasks I put off. Mostly business-related tasks that don’t have an immediate payoff, but are potentially important, like social-media management.

My friend, the life coach Shannon Wilkinson does an amazing job of helping folks with all sorts of things, including procrastination. She has just launched her new website and has offered a gift to all who visit it.

Shannon’s Less Angst More Action: The Anti-Procrastination Guide download is magical. She has you take a six-question quiz that identifies the source of your procrastination. (The choices are confidence, reward, enjoyment and distractibility.) Once that’s identified, she gives you a six-page guide and worksheet to overcome that particular type of procrastination.

I took the quiz and it turns out that my procrastination type is enjoyment. I have a hard time getting started on things I don’t like doing. (That seems perfectly natural to me.) This past weekend, I used Shannon’s worksheet to get in touch with the benefit of doing the task (in this case, social-media management) and the barrier vanished. It was unbelievable. I broke the task into ten-minute blocks and completed six blocks that day and another block the next day. And get this: it was enjoyable!

I haven’t read the other guides yet, but I encourage you to check it out. You may find yourself, like me, doing important things you’ve been putting off forever.

Tagged with: procrastination, shannon wilkinson