In keeping with last week's theme of "bad habits that are holding
me back in life," I need to talk about the productivity killer that
is...procrastination.
When I have a specific, defined, tangible deliverable to hand off
to someone, I almost never procrastinate. I'm the girl sitting next to
you in class who can't commiserate about the 10 page paper you have due
tomorrow because I already finished it. Sorry! I'm going out drinking
tonight and you're not, neener neener.
It's the intangible things - the deadlines that don't come with hard specifications - where I'm terrible.
Let's say I had an exam in school, or even in life right now let's
say I have a job interview (I don't have any coming up, grumble perpetual unemployment grumble). Both
of those events are things you should prepare for, and things for which you probably can never do enough preparation. If there's time
left, you should study.
When it comes to things like that, I like to wait and wait and wait
until I have the bare minimum amount of time left to still be
reasonably competent/knowledgeable/
Remember last week when i called myself a "lazy sack of crap?" Yup, still true.
Sometimes the "bare minimum" is still a lot of time. All the time
in the world wouldn't have been enough for me to be awesome at
accounting, so I studied my ass off for that final in business school
and in fact stayed in during a weekend-long pub crawl that many of my
classmates were on (if you know me, you know how big a deal it is for me
to willingly miss a pub crawl). So it's not like I was a completely
terrible student. I was actually really proud of my 3.6 GPA (it's my blog and I'll brag if I want to!).
After job interviews, my second favorite area to procrastinate in
is going to the gym. On most weekend days, I'll wake up, check
email/Facebook/whatever, maybe catch up on a few TV shows, and then
figure out how long I have until I have to be at whatever plans I have
for the day. I'll then work backwards, figuring out what time I
should leave the house, then what time I need to get home from the gym
in order to shower and be ready on time, and then what time I need to
leave the gym. Then I'll figure out how much time I would have at the
gym if I got ready and left right at that moment. Sometimes I'll
be like, "Oh shit I can only work out for 30 minutes, better go now!"
and I'll throw on my sneakers and head out the door. Other times I'll
realize I have 3 hours, at which point I'll sit around and apply to some
jobs or watch more TV until I have less time. Like...30 minutes.
Why do I do this to myself? It's ridiculous to work out for 30
minutes when I easily could have worked out for an hour, and it's even
more ridiculous to spend 10 minutes doing company research in advance of
an interview when I really SHOULD have spent much longer. It's a weird
form of institutionalized self-sabotage that is borne of nothing but my
[thankfully only occasional] reluctance to really TRY that hard at
anything. I'm only hurting myself here, but that's kind of the point.
I'M HURTING MYSELF.
After blogging over at Stratejoy for 5 months and giving myself a healthy dose of self-love, I've moved out of the phase of my quarterlife crisis where I
figure out what the fuck is wrong with me and WHAT IS GOING ON IN MY
HEAD ACK.
The problem here is that I'm now in the part of the QLC where I need to make changes AKA The Part With All the Hard Work. Blarg.
And so I'm trying to take Molly's advice from the Fierce Love course and implement some systems to try and change the bad habits. I've started blocking out time for the gym on my Google calendar, and even though I can (and often do) ignore it, sometimes that reminder goes off and I grump around my room as I put on my gym clothes and then, my bad attitude be damned, I go to the gym. And maybe I'll still only stay for 30 minutes sometimes because I'm tired/crampy/other excuse, but other times I tough it out for longer. And lo and behold, I always feel awesome afterward.
At the beginning of this year, I thought that transitioning from being an unhappy person to a happy one would have been the hardest part of this whole journey. But now that I AM happier, I realize just how much work I still have left. My attitude has vastly improved since the beginning of my QLC, but it's time to take that new attitude and use it to make some positive changes in my life. But, like everything, it's a matter of taking it one step at a time. Today, the gym. Tomorrow...the world.
**This is my new series called
Stratejoy Monday. To learn more about all this goodness, see the first 5
months of my Stratejoy journey here.
1 comment:
My husband says that I spend more time freaking out about having to do something than it would actually take to do it. I know this. And yet, time for shitty tasks comes around and all I can do is freak out about having to do it until the very last second when I'm forced to finally do it.
I guess what I'm saying is I feel you, girl.
Post a Comment
What's on your mind?