You know that task sitting over there, on the corner of
your desk? Yeah, the one you've been avoiding... Or should
I say, the one that's been pre-occupying your mind,
distracting you from getting anything else done
effectively... The one you're not getting solved but you're
sure having a lot of mental chatter about.
Back in the days when I was in the Big 8 consulting world
(or was it Big 6, 5, 4...) I had to write reports for
clients. For hours at a time I was combing through the
results of our team's analytical work and turning it into
narrative explanations to support the recommendations we
were making.
Some of these documents ran for 100s of pages. And, as is
natural when working with language, there were times where
a written discussion ground to a halt. I just couldn't come
up with the 'right words' to use. Aggravating as all get
out! Sitting there staring at black ink on a white screen
with my progress utterly stalled.
One part of my mind was as blank as the screen while at the
same time I was berating myself for not coming up with
better language, not moving on to the next thing I knew I
had to get to, not willing to give up on sitting there
until it was done - and a flood of inner critical chat
having a party inside my head!
I really wanted to escape from the assignment and I'm
smart... I figured out a great way to 'get away' from it.
I was one of the rare folks who had a Macintosh computer at
that time, and on my Mac I had a game called Tetris. This
program dropped shapes composed of four blocks from the top
of the screen and there was limited time to use key strokes
to change the orientation of the object before it touched
down. The object was to create a full horizontal line of
blocks so that they'd flash and disappear. The more times
the player succeeded, that faster the program ran... until
the only possible way to succeed was to get into a Zen-like
state where the hands moved faster on the keys than a
thinking mind could direct them.
So there I was, sitting at my desk, looking like I was
intently 'working'... yet doing something that had nothing
to do with writing a report.
And a funny thing happened ~ the perfect words for that
sentence showed up from some corner of my mind.
The first time it happened I was startled and grateful and
wrote down the sentence that showed up with such clarity.
The second time it occurred, I noticed that I'd had myself
really focused on the game.
As you can imagine, my inner critic started having a field
day.
"You're not supposed to be playing games! Your'e at work!
You're just masquerading here! What if someone catches on
that you're goofing around?"
I'm nothing if not stubborn, even in the face of my own
inner critic.
The next time I got stuck for language, I deliberately
played the game and tracked how long it took for the
phenomenon to produce the result.
Instead of wasting hours writing lousy language that
wandered uselessly in circles and made a mess of ideas, and
re-working it to death for even more time, I could shift to
15 minutes of Tetris and have a cogent sentence present
itself with complete clarity!
And my inner chat evaporated and the momentum on my next
task was focused and undistracted.
In fact, I decided to turn this amazing procrastination
process on deliberately. I'd look at the information
gathered, reading through it thoroughly, and then turn on
the program and let my subconscious work it's magic, and
let me know the key ideas to bring out or a key point to
describe in the report.
Then I started telling everyone else in my group what I
noticed, and asked them to try it for themselves.
Guess what? Same result!
This experience is one of the ones that spurred me to study
how our minds and consciousness operate and start
deliberately using tools that leverage them. And now I
teach them to my clients so they can boost their own
effectiveness.
I discovered that procrastination is an outward signal that
the approach you and I are taking on a task may in fact be
getting in the way of leveraging the rest of our mind's
ability to join in and solve things - sometimes much faster
than expected.
I uncovered four other techniques that work superbly for me
and I now use them all the time and teach them in my
coaching forums.
So join me and put up a placard above your desk and
cheerfully use High Payoff Procrastination today!
----------------------------------------------------
© 2008 Linda Feinholz Management expert, consultant,
and coach Linda Feinholz is "Your High Payoff Catalyst" If
you're ready to focus on your High Payoff activities, boost
your professional and personal results and have more fun,
get her FREE audio mini-course "7 Quick & Simple Steps to
Increase Your Focus, Ease Your Effort & Accelerate Your
Results" and the free weekly newsletter The Spark! Visit
http://www.YourHighPayoffCatalyst.com
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