My New-Years resolution is to stop procrastinating. Any time I see something that should be done, I say to myself "Is this worth procrastinating?". And the answer is almost always no. We are on day 9 of 2012, and I have already made ~$500 from 'stuff' that I've been collecting with no use for. I've traded and bartered items and tripled my money. Simple things that a clear head and a positive attitude can literally make money come to me.
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Anything anyone wants to add, please feel free. I would love this to be an open discussion about how we can stop procrastinating. I do not want this to turn into a bickerfest of who procrastinates.
This is your (first) problem: you do not have clearly defined outcomes.
It's nice to have a feel-good saying and talk about making money, going to the store earlier, getting "things done" more efficiently, but none of it matters if you don't have a plan. And what you need to be aware of is that it's OK to have downtime and it's OK to be human. You don't need to be doing something productive with every single second of every single day, because that's not even possible.
What you're probably feeling is behind on the things that you are on the hook for - you run low on funds, you run out of food and have to go shopping last-minute, etc., as well as goals that you desire to achieve - things that you have attached "should have's" to.
This is the hard part - going through and identifying each of those things, creating a realistic plan of action, committing to it, and sticking with it day after day. Arnold didn't get muscles by doing 1,000 pushups in one day - he stuck with it when it was boring and when he didn't feel like doing it, day after day after day. That is the real way to accomplish things - consistency.
Consistency is the key. It's far easier to generalize and say "I'll magically stop procrastinating and my life will be better!". Nope, it won't. You need systems in place to deal with each of those items, and those take time, effort, and dealing with the boringness of life after the initial emotional rush of doing something new wears off. Let's look at some of the goals you've mentioned:
"I've had a revelation this new years, after an eye-opening talking to from my father (No, I'm not 20 anymore), I have realized how much procrastination has held me back. I could own a business by now. I could own a house. I could be making a lot more $$$ at the job I have. I could have more friends. I could make more business connections and relationships. I could have a clean and beautiful house."
Let's break that down:
1. You want to own a business
2. You want to own a house
3. You want to have a higher income
4. You want to have more friends
5. You want to have more business contacts
6. You want a clean and beautiful house
That's quite a list of goals - worthy goals - but not goals that will come from "not procrastinating anymore". My suggestion would be this:
1. Identify which goals you want to achieve - as specifically as possible. The more specific the goal, the easier it is to break it into action steps to achieve.
2. Create a realistic plan. You aren't going to own a multi-million-dollar business in a month. Even if you did, you wouldn't have the habits and knowledge in place to keep it. The best way is to study what others have done and learn from their successes, create your own action plan, and put it on a schedule.
3. Commit to your plan.
4. Get to work - every day. The simple rule is this: work first, play later. The theory is that if you stop procrastinating, you'll get more done. The reality is, if you don't get your work done first for the day, you'll end up dealing with interruptions all day and you'll get nothing done. And this leads into a broader idea: you can only accomplish so much in a day, and you need downtime. Life isn't about working endlessly like a robot. Life is (partly) about setting goals and going after what you want in a consistent manner. So set your goals, make a plan, commit to it, and then work on it every day.
A big, important key here is to set accomplishable goals for the day, or you'll always feel behind. I'd imagine a lot of what you're feeling is because you are not on top of things. And a lot of that is because you haven't set clearly-defined goals and do #2, #3, and #4. So you don't know exactly what you need to do every day, but you know you're always lagging behind and you don't feel right about it. Trust me, I know exactly how you feel.
If you are only interested in a feel-good emotional approach, then I highly recommend a very silly book called "The Secret", which is the idea that merely wishing for things will magically make them appear in your life,
if you really want them bad enough:
http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Rhonda-Byrne/dp/1582701709
The unfortunate reality is that this is only step 1. I think the book has a really good concept for step #1 - identifying goals and being very specific about what you want. That's a huge key - the more clear you are about what you want, the more you will know when you have met success. If you want a sandwich, any sandwich will do. But if you want a tuna on rye, now you are getting more specific - and you will be happier with your success, because now you know what the criteria for success is.
I would recommend a few resources for you:
1. Project Management: You have a lot of good goals. If you are serious about achieving them, then you will need to be able to juggle multiple projects (a house cleaning chart, a business-running system, a grocery list, etc.) at the same time. You will need to learn how to break things down into actionable items and put them on a calendar, and you will need to learn how to do things when you schedule them so that they actually get done and move the projects forward on a day by day basis. Sort of like how laundry and dishes pile up if you don't do them on a daily or weekly basis - project management helps you stay on top of a lot of stuff.
2. 15-minute Time Tracker: Open Excel, and start typing in 12:00am, 12:15am, 12:30am, etc. all the way down to 12:00am again - 24 hours. Print this out, and log every single 15 minutes throughout your day for 3 weeks. This will give you an idea of where you put your time - when you actually sleep, what you actually do vs. what you
think you do. This was one of the most eye-opening things in my life - to actually see what I actually do every day, rather than the image I have in my brain of what I do. We lie to ourselves. So track yourself every 15 minutes of every day for 3 weeks to get an idea of what you do. And actually do this.
3. Getting Things Done: David Allen created the best system ever for creating an airtight personal tracking system for getting things done. It's a start-to-finish package for figuring out what needs to be done and what the next action is. If you adopt this system, you will become extremely powerful at actually getting stuff done, which is what the hard part of doing things is. It is NOT an easy system to master. But there is nothing better that I have ever found. Here is a link to the book:
http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things...dp/0142000280/
4. Unleash the Warrior Within: This is a really good book on getting things done as well. It's about setting up targets, and knocking them down. i.e. figuring out specifically what you want to accomplish, and then identifying the next actions required to finish them. And then doing them. I would recommend reading this book over the first few weeks of doing your 15-minute Time Tracker activity, as it gives you some perspective as to how to actually get things accomplished:
http://www.amazon.com/Unleash-Warrio...dp/0738215686/
I could go on and on. I struggle with procrastination myself, and I'm constantly trying to do better. A lot of it is simply a lack of identifying exactly what you want to accomplish, then making a plan that can actually accomplish those things, then committing to doing it (an essential step - if you never commit, then when are you going to start?), and then working on it FIRST every day (work first, play later).
Let's take a look at just one of your goals - "a clean and beautiful house". Ask yourself:
1. What is my specific desired outcome for having a clean & house?
2. Have I made an actionable plan on a calendar for doing it?
3. Have I committed to that plan?
4. Am I working on those specific items every day first, before I play?
For example - as part of your "clean & beautiful house" project, let's say you want non-cruddy toilets. So once a week, you need to get some toilet cleaner, squirt it in the john, and scrub it out. Easy. So you add that to your calendar on Saturday morning at 8:00am and put "5 minutes" next to it, and every Saturday, when 8:00am rolls around, you spend 5 minutes scrubbing the toilet. Mission accomplished. But you also need a scrubber and toilet bowl cleaner. And a calendar. And a reminder system so that you look at your calendar. And you need to commit to following that plan. And really, your cleaning chart is going to look something like this:
1. Clean toilets - weekly
2. Sweep floors - daily
3. Mop floors - weekly
4. Wash rugs - monthly
5. Vacuum carpet - weekly
6. Do dishes - daily
7. Do laundry - weekly
8. etc.
And that's not something that you're going to make or adopt overnight. And you want to have a business, make more money, have a clean house, have more friends, have more business contacts, etc. See where this is going?
The heart of it all is being consistent to a realistic plan, every day, and putting it first - developing that work first, play later habit. Then, for example, all you need to do on Saturday is (1) mop the floor, (2) do your laundry, and (3) scrub the toilets. If you do those at 8:00am, then by 8:30am you are done (work first, play later) and you are free to enjoy a guilt-free day of doing whatever the heck you want, because - mission accomplished - you have met your criteria for success. You have setup targets, and you have knocked them down. Congratulations!
Ramble ramble ramble that's all folks.
Or video games.. or TV.. or even friends/family...
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