I will admit, procrastinating is definitely one of my biggest flaws. I am notorious for putting off things that need to be done NOW to instead work on things that can be done later. In fact, as I am writing this review I had 3 books that I could have read. Based on the schedule I had made up for the blog – the other 2 books I want to have reviews posted for earlier than this one. But which book did I read and am now reviewing? You guessed it… the one that has the date the furthest away! That book is – how to stop procrastinating.
The second chapter is titled “How do you currently spend your time?” and it is the one that hit home the most for me. Trevor suggests that you create an Excel spreadsheet and in 15 minute intervals record what you are doing for a week to figure out what you spend your time on. The fact is, I do not even need to do this exercise – I *know* that when I am home most of my time is spend doing “stupid stuff” on the computer rather than working on my websites, classes or blogs. (Not that these are all THAT important, but I often end up getting behind on updates and then flustered and overwhelmed with I realize I have no free time and LOTS of stuff to do).
The book then goes on to teach techniques on how to handle things that need to be done. One of them being “Do The Big Stuff First” Which I am totally not doing right now – I picked this book to read over the other 2 that I have to read because it is only 20 pages and the other two are 200+. Even with my weekly “weekend to do list” I am always doing the tiny things so I can feel better about the list by crossing a few things off without doing much work. I guess I need to work on this!
And I have to say – the “Avoid those bright shiny objects” chapter cracked me up. I am constantly getting distracted by something else when I am working on things. It doesn’t even have to be something shiny 😉
I received one or more of the products mentioned above for free using Tomoson.com. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.