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The Lifelong Activist helps activists, volunteers, and others with a political or social mission be as productive as possible while avoiding burnout and leading a happy, healthy, and balanced life. The book offers easy and effective strategies for managing your mission, time, fears, and relationships.
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Arlington (MA) Workshops on Overcoming Procrastination and Time Management - July 7 and Aug 11
NYC Workshops - Thursday, Sept 18
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The Problem You Should Be Solving
Treating procrastination as a symptom of laziness or a lack of discipline doesn’t work because those are not the causes of procrastination. Rather, they are symptoms, just like procrastination itself is a symptom, of a deeper problem. That problem is usually either:
- You were never taught the habits of productive work; or
- Fear: of change, success, failure, etc.
Often, it’s some combination of the two.
Fear-based procrastination is a complex subject and I discuss it, and the solution to it, in Chapters 11 through 26. Most of us experience some level of fear relative to the goals that mean most to us. Let’s begin, however, with cause #1: procrastination as a “simple” behavioral issue. It may be that the behavioral “fix” described in this and the next four chapters will be enough to help you solve your procrastination problem.
Productive work begins, as you now know, with Mission Management and Time Management. Once those are accomplished and you have a schedule in keeping with your core values, your next challenge is to be able to stick to that schedule. This can be reduced to three simple Productivity Behaviors:
- Showing up to work exactly when you are supposed to.
- Instantly starting the work you are supposed to be doing.
- Staying focused on the work for an hour or more.
These Behaviors—showing up, getting right to work, and keeping at it-are the essence of productive work. They are also the points at which procrastination happens, and, consequently, the points at which it can be attacked.