Overcoming Procrastination Over Decisions

 This is the reply I sent to someone who wrote to me saying they had a problem with making even simple decisions:

 

Making decisions is a behaviour which can be learned, just like any other behaviour. You can train yourself to make big decisions by practising making small decisions.

 

Before you do that, a couple of principles:

 

1. There are no right or wrong decisions, only decisions with different consequences. You need to train yourself to stop looking for the perfect decision. Instead your attitude needs to be that you take decisions and deal with the consequences.

 

2. Doing nothing is a decision in itself. You need to train yourself to think that the choice is not between A and B, but between A, B and C where C is doing nothing.

 

So train yourself starting with small things. For example, what are you going to eat for supper tonight? Remember the choice is between a) having something for supper and b) having nothing for supper. How are you going to decide which to have? I suggest you flip a coin. That helps you to realise 1) there is no “correct” choice; 2) that doing nothing is a choice like any other and has consequences like any other.

 

If the “something for supper” choice comes up, then how do you decide what to eat? Again I suggest you decide entirely at random. Flip a coin, throw dice, whatever. What you are training yourself in here is again that there is no “correct” choice.

 

When you’ve got used to making simple decisions at random, then you can try a slight variation on this. Flip a coin and stick with the answer unless you really want to overrule it. That helps you to identify your own preferences in the matter.

 

Remember, the aim of this is to practise making decisions. Like any practise it takes a lot of repetition before the behaviour becomes learned. So don’t just do it once or twice and then forget about it. Consciously look out for small decisions you can make during the day and do it often.

Project Management

There’s been quite a bit of discussion on this site in the Comments and the Discussion Forum about the best ways to manage projects using the Do It Tomorrow techniques. The word “project” covers everything from writing an article about fly-fishing to building a bridge from the English mainland to the Isle of Wight. Do It Tomorrow is not intended to be a project planning manual, and so much of what is involved in a major project is far beyond its scope. What it is intended to address is how you manage yourself within a project - or multiple projects.

The key to managing yourself within projects is your Task Diary. You can use it for all sorts of project related activity, especially for keeping track of when actions fall due (which is not the same as the deadline for completing the action).

One very important aspect of using the Task Diary is that you need to put plenty of “project management” type tasks in it. It’s a great mistake to use it only for concrete actions such as “Call Pete”, “Place monthly order for supplies”, “Draw up budget”.

The sort of tasks I am talking about here begin with these sorts of verbs:

Think about…

Investigate…

Discuss… with …

Plan…

Review…

List…

You can probably think of more for yourself.

When I blogged yesterday about getting my business going again, the very first action I put in my Task Diary concerning it was “Think about the future of my business”.

Remember: Thinking is the most important action a manager does, and using your Task Diary allows you easily to translate that thinking into action.

Buy Do It Tomorrow

Goalless living?

One of the questions I have been asking myself recently is “What happens if we deliberately live without any goals?”

All the books I’ve written in the past and just about every other self-help book assumes that goals are essential to success. But is this true?

We tend to think that living without goals would result in lying on a couch in front of the tv all day with a six-pack of beer (or whatever your own particular form of goofing off is!) But I suspect that this is actually the result of negative goals, rather than no goals at all. A negative goal would be something like “I don’t want to do the housework”, “I don’t want write that report”, or “I don’t want to do any work”.

The reason I have been asking that question is that I am conscious that many major positive changes in my life have come about without my having formed any definite goals about the changes. It’s been far more a case of acting on opportunity out of a deeper feeling that I am taking the right action for me. I’ve written before about how it’s sometimes only possible to see what is important to you by looking back to see where your past actions have been leading you.

So if you genuinely live without goals, positive or negative, what are you going to be doing? I think a fair amount of the time you would be doing the things which you enjoy doing, simply because you enjoy doing them.

If you enjoy doing something, you are far more likely to do it well in my experience.

I’m not quite sure where this is leading me, but I am sure it will be interesting to find out!

Changing the Past?

I’ve spend quite a bit of time over the years talking about the importance of making decisions, and how to keep to them. And today I want to return to the subject.

One of the problems most of us face is that we are so busy dealing with everyday decisions that we never take the time to make the strategic decisions that are really going to make a difference. Well here’s a little exercise in two parts to look at those decisions. Set aside a few minutes to do it.

** First Part **

Think back to what you were doing five years ago 2002 and imagine that you had the power to go back and make all the decisions that you didn’t make then. What would you chose to change?

What you may realise is that the decisions you were making five years ago (or failing to make) have had a profound effect on the way you live now. They might have been decisions to sort out a relationship, or to change jobs, or to have a medical checkup, or to lose weight, or to give up smoking, or to learn a new skill, or to get fit. With any of these, if you had put them into effect five years ago you would now be reaping the benefits. How might yourlife be different now?

** Second Part **

Imagine that you’re five years in the future in 2012 and you are looking back doing the same exercise. What are the decisions that you wished you had made in 2007?

Well, this time you CAN go back and make those decisions… you can make them right now!