Do you need two hours to take in an inspirational movie so the next four hours are twice as effective? Go for it. Whatever you hand finds to do, do it with all your might! I downloaded and watched “Brother Son and Sister Moon,” the story of Francis of Assisi, and found it quite inspiring and refreshing.
Right now I feel like doing what I want to do, but I need to do what I must do. But there’s a solution—it’s called hope. After I take care of my obligations to others, I will have time to tend to the things I feel obligated to do for myself. I don’t have to put my own projects out of my mind—I can retain them in the form of hope, a neglected life force.
I just realized another source of procrastination. I anticipate that there will be distractions once I start back into a task, so I tend to anticipate a low probability of solid progress. The ease with which I am distracted is therefore a vicious cycle. The way to deal with a vicious cycle is by setting up a virtuous cycle. I don’t have all the answers right this moment, that that’s a solution set I can start developing.
Since much of life is unscripted, it makes sense to allow some slack in the schedule to accommodate the needs of others as well as myself (contrary to the advice of gurus like Brian Tracy who emphasize personal productivity as the primary driver of decisions).
This is true not only on a daily basis, but also on for my whole life. Constantly refocusing on God’s purposes may open up new areas of planning or responsiveness. And God may have purposes for the lives of others that also involve me. Subsuming my interests to God’s can have far-reaching impacts on my days and decades.
In the attempt to get tasks off my mind so I can concentrate undistracted on the current task, one technique is to take a few moments to get a future task scheduled so I will have an identified time to focus on it. This could be true of tasks I’ll perform solo, but particularly with tasks that involve coordinating with other people.
If my next action is to set a meeting, then I can move that action to the present or near future in order to get it off my mind while also getting an early start at getting it onto the schedules of the other parties.
Weekends I tend to think of as time to catch up on all the nickel and dime projects that have accumulated. Yet, I wonder if I should instead think of the “big rocks” that have to be placed first (leaving plenty of incidental room for the smaller ones) even during these discretionary times.
Recreation of body and soul are priorities that aren’t necessarily achieved by playing catch-up on low-priority activities. Sure, there’s some pressure relief that comes from knocking off a few small tasks so they don’t pop up like popcorn during the week, and I can take some time for that. But I need to allocate chunks of time to what’s important to me personally.
“Do it right the first time” is a useful principle, but only if approached realistically.
If you approach this as a religion, then you face two risks.
1. You may declare something “right” because you’re afraid to admit it’s not perfect. This effect is akin to the “zero accidents” goals factories set, which are met by denying that accidents have happened, thereby forgoing the benefit of learning from them.
2. You may may sit still forever waiting for the “right” solution.
Robert Townsend, author of the iconoclastic classic Up the Organization, describes the “do it right the first time” mandate as one of the things that stifle creativity in organizations.
In lean manufacturing processes, this is a valid principle, because it’s easier to take the time to make something right while it’s on the factory floor, where it can be done safely and efficiently with all the necessary resources at hand, than out on the lot or warehouse after it’s been built wrong. But this is part of an iterative process, not a one-shot burst of perfectionistic genius.
