The Victims of Procrastination

In goal setting, procrastination was mentioned and it was suggested to use it for the unimportant tasks. In a regular day, where does procrastination usually come in? Most of the time, when we procrastinate, the tasks that lay victim to our act are the important ones. Specifically, what are these tasks?

Usually, these are not just important but are also tasks that need to be accomplished right away. For example, if you are in school, the tasks that you are most likely to procrastinate on are your homework, take home exams, and projects. Commonly, the usual scenario is you put off doing it until the last minute and then you end up cramming to accomplish them. You then deliver a hurriedly finished paper that could have been better if only it were given more time. Thus, you only get a so-so grade instead of a supposedly high mark.

Goal Setting Workshop: An Exercise that Motivates

How goes the goal setting? How far along are you now? Just to take a break from all the hustle and bustle you are doing with your project, give yourself a short 5 minutes to yourself. What will you do with these 5 minutes? It’s not heavy work, really. It’s just a quick little exercise to remind you of how well you are doing.

So, let’s begin. If you have a journal for your goal setting project, take it out and read through the pages. Take note of all your achievements. You can highlight them using a pen or write them down on a sheet of paper. If you didn’t keep a journal, try to remember all the things that you’ve done so far, the good and successful things, and list them down on a sheet of paper. Now, take it all in. Be proud of what you’ve done. Read your accomplishment, tell yourself “I did that,” and give yourself a pat on the back or a round of applause if you wish.

That’s it! Five minutes over. Go ahead and go back to being productive. Take note of this exercise and do it every once in a while especially when you are particularly feeling down about your goal setting.

Important Things you should write in your Journal

There are numerous things that you can write in your journal. These can be personal thoughts, events that happened during the day, things that made you happy, things that made you sad, and many more. But with regards keeping a journal for the sake of goal setting, there are essential events that should be written down. I’m not saying you shouldn’t write the things that are not considered “essential” in your journal. You can, and I encourage you to. But take note to always input something in your diary that relates to your goal setting project.

What are these “essential” items? They can be your successes such as being able to procrastinate on the unimportant tasks, what you did for your goal, your failures, your feelings about these successes and failures, and your overall take on how you’re doing with your little or big project.

Using Procrastination to Your Advantage

We always think of ways to fight procrastination, but what if we used it to our advantage? Wouldn’t it be more efficient that way? How do we use procrastination to become productive, especially in goal setting?

It’s easy. Instead of procrastinating on the important tasks, why don’t we start procrastinating on doing things that aren’t really important? For example, say you want to go on facebook. What you do is, tell yourself you’ll do it later. Stop yourself from easily diving in front of the computer and staying hooked on doing something irrelevant. Tell yourself and while you’re at it, convince yourself that you can do it later when you’ve completed your important tasks.

Why don’t you try doing that today? Try it once and see if it’ll make a difference to you in terms of being productive.

Formats for Writing a Journal

In goal setting workshop, it was mentioned that starting a journal is a great habit to keep for its recording benefits. In writing your journal, there are various formats that you can use to make it a creative and interesting activity for you every day. Here are the most common formats.

1. The typical Dear-diary format. It starts with a “Dear diary,” as heading and the body is written in the first person.
2. Dear (insert name here). This is a variation of the Dear-diary format. Instead of writing to your diary, you write to someone. It can be you or an imaginary character. The body is written similar to how you write a friendly letter.
3. Another format is without a heading. It’s written in the third person and is narrative. The body appears like there’s a narrator telling the story of how your day went.

There are a lot more ways to write your journal. It’s entirely up to you how you’re going to write it. It may be one of these or a completely different style. The important thing is that you record what happened to your day and you enjoy doing it.

Journaling: When do you write?

So you’ve decided to keep a journal. When do you write it? It’s entirely up to you. Usually, the best time to do that is when your day ends. This is especially suggested if you are keeping a journal for the sake of taking notes of something you are doing such as goal setting.

If you’re doing it for personal development’s sake, then you can do it anytime you want. In addition to writing before you go to bed, you can write as soon as you wake up. You could record your dream and try to interpret it. Also, you can write anytime of the day that you feel like jotting something down like a thought, an idea, or an important realization that has to be written down.

Goal Setting Strategy: Keeping a Journal

One of the things that are suggested to be done in goal setting is keeping a journal. This is a recommended task because it serves as your record to how you’re doing in goal setting. Here, you will write all your tasks, how you did it, and what you felt while performing them. Also, you will write all the bumps you went through, what the experience was like for you, and how you solved or dealt with them.

Additionally, this serves as a source of information for you when you run into problems. You can simply leaf through the pages and find out where and what you did wrong. Moreover, when you’re going to set another goal, you can just replicate the process by looking at your journal and of course, avoid all the things that you did which lead to major problems.

Goal Setting Strategy: Scheduling (Part 2)

Basically, what you need to do in a weekly schedule is similar to the process in making a daily schedule. The only thing is that planning is done once a week and not daily. Often, an effective strategy in goal setting is to make the schedule at the start of the week, that is, Sunday evening. First thing Monday morning, review the to do list and get on with your week. The following Sunday, check the list again and make the necessary cross outs to the accomplished tasks and then make a new schedule. And the cycle repeats.

One of the benefits in planning a weekly schedule is that rescheduling unfinished tasks is easier as you will be able to see which among the seven days have a free slot that will fit perfectly to accomplishing the pending tasks. So this time around, make sure you reschedule them at the right day so that they will get done and not stay undone.

Goal Setting Strategy: Scheduling

For goal setting to be effective, a good strategy to employ is scheduling. You need to create a schedule for your activities in a day or a week and incorporate the little tasks that you need to achieve your goal into this schedule. Now, how do you do this?

If you’re just starting out, the best plan of action is to create a schedule on a daily basis. And then when you’ve successfully stuck to your schedule for about 2 to 3 weeks, you can then proceed to making a weekly schedule. The suggested time to create this daily plan is at night before you go to bed. In the morning, as soon as you wake up, check your schedule and review all the items that you need to do for the day. And then, when the day ends, look at your to do list again and cross out all the things you were able to do. For the items you weren’t able to accomplish, reschedule them for the next day but mark them as a priority task. Again, recreate a schedule for the following day. Do this every day until it becomes a habit that will be engraved into your system.

1/5th might just be One Whole

Have you ever noticed that when bad things happen, it’s usually because of something you did that you didn’t, for the life of you, think would have any effect whatsoever on your situation? This is basically what the 80/20 Rule, which is discussed in Goal Setting Workshop, is all about. It states that 20 percent of what you do will most likely yield an effect of 80 percent.

Wouldn’t it be nice if it was the other way around? I mean that you do so little or exert only little effort and it will result to a very big and positive effect on your life. Yes it would. It would be really nice. But is it even possible? Well yes it is! All you have to do is make sure that you give full effort in doing that 20 percent that will yield the 80 percent positive effect. To be able to do that, you need to carefully plan out your actions and to do that you need to have an effective goal setting strategy.