Procrastination, and how to pay off the to-do list debt

Procrastination, and how pay off the to-do list debt

Sometimes we procrastinate because we feel overwhelmed by the mountain of things we are supposed to be doing. If you look at your to-do list and it shows 60 overdue items, it’s little wonder if you want to bury your head in the sand!

“What difference does it make if I do one of these things now; I will still have 59 which feels as bad as having 60”

So, treat it like you might a financial debt, and make a repayment plan. Now, instead of 60 overdue items today, you have 1/day for the next 60 days, or 2/day for the next 30 days, or 3/day for the next 20 days, etc. Obviously, you may need to work out whether some are greater temporal priorities and if so, bump those to the top of the list. But don’t sweat the minutiae; your list doesn’t have to be perfectly ordered, just broadly have more urgent things to the top and less urgent things to the bottom.

Note: this repayment plan means having set repayment dates.

Up front, sit down and assign each item a specific calendar date on which you will do that thing.

This is not a deadline! It is your schedule. You’ll not try to do it sooner, and you won’t postpone it for later. You will just do that item on that date.

A productivity app like ToDoist can help with this, but paper is fine too.

What’s important here, psychologically, is that each day you’re looking not at 60 things and doing the top item; you’re just looking at today’s item (only!) and doing it.

Debt Reduction/Cancellation

Much like you might manage a financial debt, you can also look to see if any of your debts could be reduced or cancelled.

We wrote previously about the “Getting Things Done” system. It’s a very good system if you want to do that; if not, no worries, but you might at least want to borrow this one idea….

Sort your items into:

Do / Defer / Delegate / Ditch

• Do: if it can be done in under 2 minutes, do it now.
• Defer: defer the item to a specific calendar date (per the repayment plan idea we just talked about)
• Delegate: could this item be done by someone else? Get it off your plate if you reasonably can.
• Ditch: sometimes, it’s ok to realize “you know what, this isn’t that important to me anymore” and scratch it from the list.

As a last resort, consider declaring bankruptcy

Towards the end of the dot-com boom, there was a fellow who unintentionally got his 5 minutes of viral fame for “declaring email bankruptcy”.

Basically, he publicly declared that his email backlog had got so far out of hand that he would now not reply to emails from before the declaration.

He pledged to keep on top of new emails only from that point onwards; a fresh start.

We can’t comment on whether he then did, but if you need a fresh start, that can be one way to get it!

In closing…

Procrastination is not usually a matter of laziness, it’s usually a matter of overwhelm. Hopefully the above approach will help reframe things, and make things more manageable.

Sometimes procrastination is a matter of perfectionism, and not starting on tasks because we worry we won’t do them well enough, and so we get stuck in a pseudo-preparation rut. If that’s the case, our previous main feature on perfectionism may help:

Perfectionism, And How To Make Yours Work For You