A Simple Technique to Overcome Procrastination

From JimGibbon:

One Simple Technique to Help You Overcome Procrastination and Start Writing Now

August 5th, 2006 | Productivity

For the last three weeks I’ve been using something called “contingency management” to write more, and more consistently, than at any point in my entire life. I now write an average of three pages a day (typed, double-spaced) during one 30-minute session. I’ve also used this technique to jump start two projects that were stalled for months.

Only a small fraction of my writing would be publishable, but I now have over 60 pages of new ideas, hunches, questions, and possible solutions that simply didn’t exist a month ago. On top of everything, I no longer cringe when I think about writing and my self-confidence has skyrocketed.

Contingency management has been around for years, but I just learned about it in a great book by Robert Boice called Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing. This is required reading for writers in all fields who want to overcome the inertia of writer’s block and procrastination.

Component #4 — Acting Now v2

During the act of Emptying, the user often discovers that a number of time demands can be completed with only a 2-5 minute burst of immediate activity.

Definition

Acting Now means taking immediate action on items that have been emptied from a capture point. For example, a friend’s new phone number can be entered immediately into a contact database of phone numbers within 60 seconds.

The easiest course of action for some time demands is to deal with them immediately, rather than to go through a longer process of entering them into a list, or into a schedule.

Also, there are occasions, in which taking immediate action leads to other actions, and care must be taken to deal with these follow-up items by either capturing them, or placing them in the time management system.

Principles

Act on as many items that can be acted on now as time will allow.