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Dropping Tasks
Positive Delay
Negative Delay - Procrastination
Most often when people delay things they are procrastinating - putting them off until they are
unavoidable. Procrastination slows achievement of current goals, and restricts future
opportunity as time is clogged up. The time spent before the job is properly tackled is usually
wasted.
Procrastination can come about in a number of ways:
- Paralysis by planning:
Here the planning process is drawn out to avoid confronting an issue. Plans are argued and
polished and perfected, but implementation of the plans is delayed unnecessarily.
- Perfectionism:
Often tasks are fussed over long after they have been achieved to a quite sufficient level. This
often serves to delay tackling other problems. Often perfection simply is not required, and is
not cost-effective to achieve.
- Boredom:
Boring jobs are very easy to delay for spurious reasons. Here self-discipline is needed.
- Hostility:
Where you are hostile to the task, or to the person giving the task, there is a strong temptation
to delay.
- 'The Deadline High':
Coming up against a tight deadline and meeting it is immensely satisfying. It can be
associated with strong rushes of adrenaline. The problems with this are that you may find that
jobs are being delayed precisely to get this rush of adrenaline, and that occasionally jobs may
fail because they have been left too late.
The way to tackle procrastination is to set deadlines by which goals should be achieved. The
way to avoid Deadline High procrastination is to set intermediary goals which must be
achieved.
Dropping Tasks
Positive Delay
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