Procrastination

"Until you value yourself, you will not value your time.
Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it." ~ M. Scott Peck

I will be the first to admit that I have an issue with procrastination. Every morning when I wake up I make a mental to-do list. It’s not a long list. It’s not full of a few large tasks. In fact, it’s a perfectly reasonable list.

While at work, I rework the list for when I get home from work. This is, of course, after I promptly ignore the list of tasks that I have assigned myself to do during my hour long lunch break. Although, to be honest, I sometimes get the things I wanted to get done during my break done. More often than not, I don’t. Especially if the task is working on my novel. 
When I get home, sometimes I manage to get a task or two done from my list, but mostly I don’t. I distract myself, I play at something. I watch a movie or read a book – sometimes to the point of neglecting my own dinner.

Yes, it’s fair to say that I have a problem with procrastination.

Every now and again I take a stab at trying to conquer this particular dragon. Obviously, I’ve been pretty unsuccessful at this. I have decided that it is time for me to, yet again, take up the sword and shield and kill the damned dragon once and for all.

The only question is how?

So far my best thought is of creating myself a checklist; a daily, weekly and monthly to do list. Leaving some time for fun, of course. A set of rules would be useful too. Guidelines on how my checklist system works. Such as, the computer cannot be turned on until X is completed.

At the same time, I know there needs to be some room for flexibility. There is a fine line to walk between rigid structure and too much wiggle room to allow for procrastination. Every day cannot be so full of tasks that I have no time do something I enjoy.

There also needs to be space to add unexpected tasks. For example, I love to cook and my friends sometimes take advantage of this and I’ll unexpectantly be cooking for company. Sometimes I spend an entire weekend away from home as well. These weekends are nice, but the tasks that need to be completed at home won’t get done if I’m not there. They still need to be done, but I’ll need to fit the task in elsewhere.

There seems to be so much to consider that I almost want to procrastinate on trying to end my procrastination.

The logical advice is take small steps, break the task up. In other words, I need to torture the dragon to death. It sounds very macabre when I put it that way! Still, it’s what I need to do to kill it and keep it dead. It’s amazing how well the procrastination dragon can revive itself when you thought it dead and buried.

So where do I start? Any suggestions? How do I go about killing the dragon slowly and forming the good habits I’ve always wanted to have in my life, but have put off doing for so long?

Should I start with my checklist idea? Create a checklist of tasks/chores that need to be completed on a daily, weekly and monthly schedule? Where do I put this list to make sure I am constantly reminded of my tasks? How am I to hold myself accountable for these tasks?

So many questions to which I am sure there must be good answers, but I don’t know these answers. So I turn to you for help and advice. I must start tonight of course. If I put it off for too long I may just put it off forever.

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As a part of starting now, I didn't leave my blog post until I was too tired to write and just wanted to go to bed. Hopefully that means this is much more interesting and makes far more sense then most of my posts do!