Teaching Business Communication and Workplace Issues

This article debunks four common procrastination myths we often tell ourselves in order to avoid doing the hard work that needs to be done.

There are less than one hundred days left in 2011.
If you have a backlog of projects that you meant to work on this year, but which you haven’t gotten around to, it’s very likely that procrastination is the culprit.

Timothy Pychyl, Ph.D., creator of the popular web site procrastination.ca, is one of the world’s foremost experts on procrastination. Dr. Pychyl defines procrastination as “the needless, often irrational, voluntary delay of an intended task”. That is, you intend to work on a task but you go off and start working on something else which you know is not as important, and which doesn’t need to get done right away...

There is always more to do than time in which to do it. And the more you take on, the more there is to do. You finish one task and six more pop out of no where; it never ends. To toss a major understatement at you - you need to invest your time wisely and that means being productive.

Yes, the dreaded 'P' word. Easier said than done, that's for sure. Sometimes, you just aren’t productive. You want to be, but things seem to never get done.

Here’s why...

What Kills Productivity?
There are only a few broad reasons why your productivity could be suffering. I’ll talk about all the specific instances in a moment, but let’s start with a high-level look:  . . .

The best way to produce quality results that ring try with what matters to you involves a simple step: be honest with yourself.

There are many tools you can use to increase your level of productivity. Whether paper-based solutions are your cup of tea or you’ve dove into the digital well of task management offerings, you’d be wasting a ton of time trying to discover all of the tools out there. I’d wager it is one of the least productive things you could ever do.

But of all the tools at your disposal, the one between your ears is the one that needs to be actively engaged to allow for prominent increases to happen. There’s a human component that leads to better productivity on the whole, and while analog tools may not remove the brain from the equasion as fully as digital ones might, when we trust our lists as written without using our brain in tandem, the results for the items that are crucial to us are less desirable...