I am Always Late

Along with lack of motivation, such factors as vagueness, uncertainty and lack of clarity are among the key reasons of our bad habits, discouragement and procrastination. For those who are determined to fight with these problems and look for positive changes in their life, I would like to offer a strategy created by Dr. Brian Tracy, an experienced time management specialist, lecturer and business coach, who wrote several books of special techniques and recommendations for those who suffer from chronic procrastination and lack of personal effectiveness. He argues that everyone who wants to be successful in this world has to define own goals and aspirations. This can be done in the following 7 steps:

Step 1. Decide, what exactly do you want to achieve in this life, where do you want to be and what do you want to possess? Specifying your goals and your strategies to achieve them will help you in one important thing: to avoid doing useless, low value tasks and wasting your time and efforts. “One of the very worst uses of time is to do something very well that need not be done at all”, Tracy says.

Step 2. Think on paper. Try to write down at least 10 goals you want to achieve within the next year. Make them clear and crystallize them on paper. Now you see that by writing them down, your dreams and goals turned from fantasies into something tangible and real, didn’t they?

Step 3. Estimate an optimistic deadline and a pessimistic deadline for your goals. If your goal has no fixed time limits, it loses its relevance and urgency. You have to establish clear time frames for achieving your goals and assume the responsibilities not to procrastinate all the time, but work on this day by day.

Step 4. Think about everything you need to do, learn or accomplish in order to achieve your goals, and make a list of the findings. This will, definitely, make your goals closer to you. Also, this list will give you a picture of the most important or the largest tasks you need to accomplish on your way to every goal.

Step 5. Organize the list of the findings by priority and time sequence. You can use charts, boxes or circles. This plan will help you to increase your productivity and efficiency, so you will definitely be more successful than anyone who carries his goals in the mind.

Step 6. Take action! Find something that you can do right away in order to get closer to your goals at least for an inch. You can arrange a meeting with your future business partner, or find some important online information for your project. Do anything right away!

Step 7. Make a habit of doing something that will move you toward achieving your goals every single day. Learn something new every day, get engaged in specific activities or discussions, and involve more and more people in your projects. Keep moving forward and do not miss a day!

In my previous articles I was mentioning motivation as the main moving force for personal development and success. It is quite obvious that if a person is not enough motivated and challenged to do something, he or she will not struggle to succeed, as well as never feel sad for lost opportunities. Now, we are about to learn the second not less important factor which frequently causes our absolute indifference and poor self-discipline. This factor is lack of clarity: a lack of clear and specific goals, and lack of understanding what we want to achieve, when and in what way.

It is reported that only 3-5% of people have clear realistic written goals and objectives for their life. Such people are supposed to be more confident and more determined on their way to achieving those goals. They are also considered to be more reliable, more pragmatic and precise, and they usually have fewer problems with estimating the time for accomplishing their tasks. Finally, they are supposed to be more successful.

That is why time management specialists recommend to write down your specific long-term goals on a piece of paper, then write down your short-term goals, and then do all that “scheduling” thing, specify the deadlines for every step, etc. They say that this will be your roadmap to success. Well, this idea can sound useless and quite senseless to many people, especially to those who have some unclear and “standard” goals in their mind, like “I will buy a better car when I get paid for this project” or “I will start a diet and lose 10 pounds till the end of this year”. I understand those people, and I admit that they can live their life happily without any planning and scheduling on paper.

All I want to ask you now is just giving a clear answer to yourself: do you have some certain ambitions or aspirations in your life? What are you trying to achieve in this life? What is you life? Is it like going with the flow and sitting on fence, or like looking for something special and helping other people to feel comfortable in this world? Where do you want to be in 10 or 20 years? What do you need to do for that? It is not for scheduling or planning something, it is for yourself. Take a break from your daily routine for a minute, sit down and think about your future, your goals and reasons you live this life for. Also, try to understand that the clearer your goals are, the easier it will be for you to overcome your procrastination and laziness, learn being successful and find your place among the most productive people of your generation.

1. When you need to do something that is really important, you usually try to escape from doing that by finding something else to do that is not less important. Moreover, you start truly believing that new tasks are really more topical than the one you don’t want to do. If this situation is typical for you, you have to start working on increasing your motivation and boosting your self-control.

2. Our laziness likes the words “here” and “now”. Chronic lazy people rarely think about tomorrow and about their future, they mostly live in the present and care only about today. Also, they always give promises to themselves to start a new life, to do this and that, etc. etc… But tomorrow everything repeats again and again. If you can not do anything about your laziness, I can offer you, for example, to lay a bet with someone that you can do something special, something great and newsworthy. Maybe, this trick will open new horizons for you….

3. Do you know that our laziness needs some creephole or crawlway to sneak in on you? It can not come up at any time and any place. For example, if you are hungry for two days, you laziness will not stop you from looking for a meal. Or, if you have an exam tomorrow, you will most probably feel anxious and look through some textbooks or notes. Therefore, in order to win the fight against laziness, you need to set up very ambitious goals and give your laziness no chances to find that crawlway to approach you.

4. Many specialists tend to suppose that our laziness is an acquired individual trait that depends on the way our parents educate and bring us up.  However, if you were not lucky with proper education and training in your childhood, you can open your way to changing yourself. It is difficult, but if you really want to get better and achieve more success in your life, you must do everything possible and learn to struggle against the stream of laziness.

5. Always remember that laziness is very infectious. If you join a group or a company where everybody is lazy, there is no doubt that soon you will get buried in sloth, too. Try to do everything possible to avoid such groups and never model your conduct on lazy people.

6. If you are not an irresponsible teenager anymore, but your obscene laziness still overrules you, so you mostly do what you want and not what you need to do, you must have unconscious unpleasant impulses in your mind: hidden feelings of guilt and remorse. And, whether you want this or not, there is a certain war of motifs in your mind that results in growing feeling of uncertainty, discontent or unfulfilled opportunities. Do not let this all hang out, cos’ these things can cause certain psychological problems and traumas…

Sometimes I have a feeling that I can do more than I actually do. But when I try to do more, I have to face Her Majesty Laziness. Well, everyone knows what I am talking about. I define laziness as the situation when you know what to do and how to do something, but … you do not want to do this. Certainly, everyone has own idea about laziness. Moreover: everyone has own type and symptoms of it: some of those are typical and some are quite individual.

•    Lack of willpower is one of the most frequent syndromes that cause laziness. Sometimes, even when everything is well planned and considered, your laziness can take over you and keep you from coming to the point for days, or maybe for months and years. In such case, it is very important to take action and at least begin doing what you planned to do: it can make you get focused on your task.

•    Lack of motivation is another type of laziness. Sometimes a person is not sure, why he or she has to do something, or he/she expects someone else to do this job. It is possible to fight with this type of laziness by increasing motivation. Think about the reward you will receive for this task and consider all the pros and cons. Also, remember that if your task is not properly elaborated and considered, only motivation will not be enough for completing this task successfully.

•    For many people, laziness is an important part of their lifestyle. Let’s see how everything comes about: a guy receives a task and starts thinking over the ways to complete it in a rational way. It takes some time and efforts, so people around him start thinking that he is lazy because he is not doing anything else but thinking. Finally, under this influence the guy also starts thinking that he is lazy, so he tries to do everything possible to change himself. Usually, it goes from bad to worse. However, in the end of the ends, when the deadline arrived, our guy manages to complete the task successfully and on time.

•    Sometimes our laziness is a drive to avoid responsibility. The roots of this problem go back to our childhood, when our parents used to protect us from the necessity to accept full responsibility or take the consequences for our deeds. This is one of the most dangerous types of laziness, which, however, can be cured.

•    Unless I be mistaken, it was Sigmund Freud who argued that laziness takes source from the drive of all human beings to seek pleasure. When we do something, we take pleasure from what we are doing. When we are lazing, we also take pleasure from not doing anything.

•    Some lucky people have so called “intuitive laziness”. They know very well what they need to do, but they feel lazy to do that. Later on it turns out that it was actually not necessary to do that. This type of laziness can save your time and efforts from doing useless things, but in many situations it is quite deceptive.

•    There is one type of laziness that has no negative nature. For many people laziness works as a defense mechanism for overwork. What I am talking about is: some people work so much and simply get tired of working hard all the time. They slow down and immediately start thinking that they are lazy, start blaming themselves for that and go into depression. But all they actually needed was a rest.

•    Many lazy people used to justify their laziness by saying “Laziness Drives All Progress”. Just give it a thought: is it our usual bottomless laziness, or our desire to do something faster and without spending much of efforts? Only such “creative laziness” can drive all progress. What progress can you achieve by lying on the sofa doing nothing?