Discardia_ More Life, Less Stuff - Dinah Sanders [16]
Staying in a hotel for business? Don't drink the tiny $5 water bottle in the room. Instead, take a walk over to the nearest grocery or drug store and buy a big bottle for half that price. Your legs could use the stretch and you'll see a little of the outside world in a new place.
Leave one dose of painkillers or other frequently used medications in your bag. Why suffer the hassle of hunting for some when you already have a headache?
These travel principles can apply to your life back home, too. Always need a pen in the car and don’t ever have one? Round up a dozen pens and put them in the glove compartment along with a film canister or other little container for meter change. Often caught sniffling without a tissue? Carry a handkerchief, and throw some hand sanitizer in your bag to help avoid some of those colds. Constantly scrambling for the transit fare? Keep that fare amount and $20—enough for an emergency taxi ride—separate from the rest of your cash in your wallet. Set yourself up for smooth sailing even when the seas get rough.
Don’t give yourself a hard time for not keeping things in your head. Make a list. Your brain isn’t meant to carry all that stuff around; it’s meant for thinking and working on the stuff on your list. Keep some index cards or other small note-taking supplies with you and put them next to the phone and the computer. Write yourself notes. Leave yourself voicemails. Send yourself emails. It’s fine.
No one remembers everything. Really.
Symptom #6: Procrastination
Solution #6: Bottom Line: Deeds are Better
Joining a Facebook group about creative productivity is like buying a chair about jogging.
—Merlin Mann, productivity guru and humorist
You have a choice
Ah, procrastination: the villain in so many stories of the great adventures we might have had—if only. Here’s what’s certain: You do not always in the moment want to do what you know most serves your goals in the big picture. You drag your feet, check email and social messaging services “just once more,” follow that link to the funny YouTube video, flip through magazines or TV channels, anything but buckle down to the task in front of you.
Procrastination is an act of denial. It is pretending that you don’t care to achieve something. The key to conquering procrastination is to perceive it, see it for what it is, and recognize that you are making a conscious choice.
Once you know that you’re a making a choice, you can, at minimum, increase the satisfaction provided by whatever it is you do instead of what you should be doing. Instead of aimlessly filling time avoiding a task, take a conscious timeout to do something that will bring you real pleasure.
If you aren’t going to accomplish the task you think is most important, at least accomplish something that’s on your list. Around my house, we call this “procrastaproductivity,” which can be a highly effective way to knock a lot of things off your to-do list when there’s something daunting at the top. It’s amazing how attractive chores can become when you’re avoiding another task, but don’t let yourself put that tough thing off for too long or you’ll continually be stressed about what you are not accomplishing. For every few things you do further down your list, put in a short lap on that big scary one at the top.
Beware of spending so much time trying to come up with the perfect tool or method to do something that you never actually start. Nerds are particularly prone to this pattern of avoidance, sometimes spending hours trying to find the best software for a task that’s easier to do physically than digitally, or wasting days fiddling with the configuration of their tools. Ironically, a cheap and rudimentary tool can sometimes encourage use more than a highly polished one because it sets the best balance between “good enough” and “not too good to tinker with.” An example of this is setting up a shelf