Procrastinemail

This summer --

I vow to spend at least 30 minutes attending to emails each day. If I finish attending to emails in less than 30 minutes, then I will be free to go. If it takes slightly longer than 30 minutes to finish answering emails and I get tired, then I will allow myself a break.

However, at least 30 minutes a day.

Sunday email catch-up is just getting too ridic. Truth.

WIN

Gracias, SFGate.

Tools to reclaim your time and goals

1. Start with a clear-cut list of what you want to accomplish short term and long term in your own life. A comprehensive survey across numerous cultures showed that the happiest people wake up every day to clear-cut life goals. Clear-cut goals allow the brain to focus on immediate steps and help prevent anxiety and depression from flourishing.

2. Eliminate people from your social network who are procrastinators and slackers. The newest research on social contagion theory from Harvard Medical School shows that people do things in clusters, such as quitting smoking and becoming obese. "Birds of a feather flock together" is true for goal accomplishment, as well.

3. Prime your environment for goal accomplishment. People who see words and pictures that spur them on to feel good about themselves and their goals behave more proactively than people who read stories, listen to music or see pictures of people or situations that make them depressed, or that remind them of failures in their lives.

4. Install an application like RescueTime, www.rescuetime.com, a free time-management tool, on your computer so that you can print out a log of where your time went that week. This will help you figure out how many hours you spent being productive and how many you spent on Facebook, Twitter or other sites that don't generate productive results.

5. Create accountability for yourself around results. Tell significant people what your goals are and when you expect to accomplish them. The more people who know about your goals, the more likely you are to accomplish them.

6. Remove all games, instant message programs and other distractions from your computer or cell phone so that you are not tempted to use them to distract yourself from getting work done. Use them as a reward, if anything.

7. Know your own procrastination sequence, and then break it. We all procrastinate by using specific behaviors and thoughts to take us off course, and once we know what those steps are, we are in a position to change them.

8. Have a "mastery" experience first thing in the morning so that you start the day with a "win" around self-regulation. This could mean doing your exercises or having a productive routine around making beds and sweeping a floor before the day is under way. Having a "win" first thing in the day has the domino effect of making you behave more proactively throughout the rest of the day.

9. Become a little bit happier. People who move their moods from negative to positive, or neutral to positive, by stimulating laughter or being generous, have been found to restore depleted willpower energy. Sometimes a quick look at a funny YouTube video, or calling a humorous friend, can make all the difference in getting something done.

10. Reward yourself for a completed job. People who reward positive actions are more likely to repeat those actions in the future. Rewards also allow us to savor something that makes us happy, which prolongs well-being and promotes further proactive behavior.

Guide to An Efficient Homework Session... for me.

Notes to self:
-------------------------------------------------------
1. Close Facebook. Myspace. Twitter. Gchat. WHATEVER. I know it's boring, I know that no one is messaging you, but when you have your paper open in one window, and your News Feed open in another window, you're gunna suddenly become curious about that dude that lived on your floor freshman year whom you haven't spoken to in three semesters. You also won't care. But you'll wonder. And you'll wonder enough to abandon your paper for 4 more minutes.

2. Put away your TO-DO list. Put away your calendar. Worry about all that later.

3. Stop eating if you're not hungry. In fact, back away from the kitchen...

4. Keep a water bottle close at hand. It staves off hunger, minimizes reasons to leave your work (and become distracted yet again), and hey... in my experience, keeping hydrated solves a lot of personal medical problems.

5. Resist the urge to blog.

----------------------------------------------------

End note (not blog) to self.

Time

I try to stay positive in my day-to-day everythings, and I generally succeed. Let me just preface this second consecutive, negative blog post with the explanation that writing is my outlet to frustrations of all sorts.

That being said.

People who disrespect others' time = fail at life.

I'm tired of getting stood up, of waiting on others, and of being forced to rearrange my schedule (and thus the schedules of others who count on me). I understand the value of time, which is all well and good, until my time is at the mercy of another.

To those of you who have been late, canceled plans last minute, or just never bothered to show up, think of the consequence of your actions on the rest of us, please.

We're hungry from waiting for you. We're waiting in the rain. We live far from home and can't be out too late. We have other appointments to attend to. We arranged our schedule around the time when you promised that you would be free. We were forced to cancel other plans to make this meeting with you.

The possibilities - or probabilities - don't end.

I'm the kind of person that seizes control of any situation at hand. The fact that these inconveniences (to put it lightly) keep coming up tells me that I need to start taking control.

My Options:

1. Make it clear to people that I have somewhere to be afterwards, and that the meeting needs to be over by a certain time. Hopefully, this will make it obvious to them that they need to arrive on time.
2. Always bring work to do so that even if I end up having to wait or getting stood up, I can make the most of my idle time.
3. If they are late by an unreasonable amount of time, leave and go on with my schedule.
4. Lead by example.