by Jim Rohn | Apr 30, 2018 | Time Management
Perseverance is about as important to
achievement as gasoline is to driving a car. Sure, there will be times when you
feel like you’re spinning your wheels, but you’ll always get out of the rut
with genuine perseverance. Without it, you won’t even be able to start your
engine.
The opposite of perseverance is
procrastination. Perseverance means you never quit. Procrastination usually
means you never get started, although the inability to finish something is also
a form of procrastination.
Ask people why they procrastinate and you’ll
often hear something like this: “I’m a perfectionist. Everything has to be just
right before I can get down to work. No distractions; not too much noise; and
of course I have to be feeling well physically, too. I can’t work when I have a
headache.” The other end of procrastination—being unable to finish—also has a
perfectionist explanation: “I’m just never satisfied; I’m my own harshest
critic; if all the i’s aren’t dotted and all the t’s aren’t crossed, I just
can’t consider that I’m done. That’s just the way I am, and I’ll probably never
change.”
Do you see what’s going on here? A fault is
being turned into a virtue. The perfectionist is saying their standards are
just too high for this world. This fault-into-virtue syndrome is a common
defense when people are called upon to discuss their weaknesses, but in the end
it’s just a very pious kind of excuse-making. It certainly doesn’t have
anything to do with what’s really behind procrastination.
Remember, the basis of procrastination could
be fear of failure. That’s what perfectionism really is, once you take a hard look at it.
What’s the difference between being afraid of being less-than-perfect or afraid
of anything else? You’re still paralyzed by fear. What’s the
difference between never starting or never finishing? You’re still stuck.
You’re still going nowhere. You’re still overwhelmed by whatever task is before
you. You’re still allowing yourself to be dominated by a negative vision of the
future in which you see yourself being criticized, laughed at or punished. This
negative vision of the future is really a mechanism that allows you to do
nothing. It’s a very convenient mental tool.
I’m going to tell you how to beat
procrastination. I’m going to show you how to turn procrastination into
perseverance, and if you do what I suggest, the process will be virtually
painless. It involves using two very powerful principles that foster
productivity and perseverance instead of passivity and procrastination.
Break it down.
No matter what you’re trying to accomplish, whether
it’s writing a book, climbing a mountain or painting a house, the key to
achievement is your ability to break down the task into manageable pieces and
knock them off one at one time. Focus on accomplishing what’s right in front of
you at this moment. Ignore what’s off in the distance someplace. Substitute
real-time positive thinking for negative future visualization.
Suppose I ask you if you could write a
400-page novel. Sounds impossible, right? But suppose I ask you a different
question. Suppose I ask if you can write a page and a quarter a day for one
year. Do you think you could do it? Now the task is starting to seem more
manageable. We’re breaking down the 400-page book into bite-size pieces. Even
so, I suspect many people would still find the prospect intimidating. Do you
know why? Writing a page and a quarter may not seem so bad, but you’re being
asked to look ahead one whole year. When people start to look that far ahead,
many of them automatically go into a negative mode. So let me formulate the
idea of writing a book in yet another way. Let me break it down even more.
Suppose I ask you if you can fill up a page
and a quarter with words—not for a year, not for a month, not even for a week,
but just today? Don’t look any further ahead than that. I believe most people
would confidently declare that they could accomplish that. These are the same
people who feel totally incapable of writing a whole book.
If I said the same thing to those people
tomorrow—if I told them, I don’t want you to look back, and I don’t want you to
look ahead, I just want you to fill up a page and a quarter this very day—do
you think they could do it?
One day at a time. We’ve all heard that
phrase. That’s what we’re doing here. We’re breaking down the time required for
a major task into one-day segments, and we’re breaking down the work involved in
writing a 400-page book into page-and-a-quarter increments.
Keep this up for one year, and you’ll write
the book. Discipline yourself to look neither forward nor backward and you can
accomplish things you never thought you could possibly do. And it all begins
with those three words: Break it down.
Write it down.
We know how important writing is to goal-setting. The writing you’ll do for beating procrastination
is very similar. Instead of focusing on the future, you’re going to be writing
about the present just as you experience it every day. Instead of describing
the things you want to do or the places you want to go, you’re going to
describe what you actually do with your time, and you’re going to keep a
written record of the places you actually go.
In other words, you’re going to keep a diary
of your activities. And you’re going to be amazed by the distractions, detours
and downright wastes of time you engage in during the course of a day. All of
these get in the way of achieving your goals. For many people, it’s almost like
they planned it that way, and maybe at some unconscious level they did. The
great thing about keeping a time diary is that it brings all this out in the
open. It forces you to see what you’re actually doing—and what you’re not doing.
Your time diary doesn’t have to be anything
elaborate. Just buy a little spiral notebook that you can easily carry in your
pocket. When you go to lunch, when you drive across town, when you go to
the dry cleaners, when you spend some time shooting the breeze at the copying
machine, make a quick note of the time you began the activity and the time it
ends. Try to make this notation as soon as possible; if it’s inconvenient to do
it immediately, you can do it later. But you should make an entry in your time
diary at least once every 30 minutes, and you should keep this up for at least
a week.
Break it down. Write it down. These two
techniques are very straightforward. But don’t let that fool you: These are
powerful and effective productivity techniques. This is how you beat
procrastination. This is how you get yourself started.
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