Procrastination is the greatest thief of success. And the easiest way to fall victim to this thief, is to allow yourself to be distracted. Ask me. I’ve been a master of procrastination through ‘worthwhile’ and quite hysterical distractions. But there are some tips and tricks that can force you to focus!
When I first got to move from the farm as an 18-year old to start going to university in the big city – in this case, Pretoria, South Africa – I felt as if I had arrived in a huge, live Christmas Box, full of new gifts of ideas and new people that were there purely for me to discover! I came to study medicine, but instead, I ended up studying all kinds of fascinating things beyond that. I discovered new tastes (olives), new sounds (jazz), new knowledge (horrorscopes, yes!), learnt that were new lifestyles (gay), learnt a new language (French) and of course, met lots and lots of new people.
Having grown up in a very closely guarded, but also very loving farming community, I was used to knowing everyone, at least from ‘sight’: the kids and their parents at school and the teachers and pastor were all as close as ‘family’. All the people living on our farm and the neighbouring farms of my uncles were known to belong to a particular homestead nestled in among the hills and forests. Every person I saw on the street in the little town where we did our weekly grocery shopping was a known person. If there was a stranger, it was very easy to figure out to which known person this visitor ‘belonged to’ or if it was just someone passing through. Strangers really didn’t come to this town, unless they knew someone there, sold stuff into the shops, or were lost.
When I got to the city, after a while I experienced a ‘distraction disorder’: in the sea of unknown people I would suddenly identify someone from the back that walked just like so-and-so. I would start running to meet them, only to find that when they turned around, they were someone else. Then it got worse. I would start panicking because I saw all these people walking with their backs to me and I would never know how they looked like from the front! So I’d start running to see if I could catch up with them, just to see their face, once. I was seldomly fast enough. Needless to say, this type of distraction didn’t help me in reaching my goal, which after all, was to study medicine!
My imagination has always been my greatest ‘distractor’. My childhood and teenage years were filled with very little ‘outside’ entertainment, and so, instead, my imagination was my own personal ‘virtual reality’ home entertainment device. Television only arrived in my life when I was already twelve years old in the form of a tiny black-and-white tester screen. My dad, who was known as ‘Prof’ around town, would install everyone else’s television sets, before he could afford an own one. But he was also highly innovative, and so we spent weekend nights driving around in the rebuilt Merc on the farm, with the tester TV on the dashboard, and my dad’s arm stuck out of the window, holding a television antenna that he had custom-built out of an old washing machine drum. I’ll never forget the excitement of watching the first children’s programmes on that tiny, blurry black-and-white box.
For the rest I had acquired my mom’s taste for reading (I started reading on her lap as a three-year old) and could easily sink away into a world of someone else’s make-believe that would jump into reality as I turned the pages of one more incredible book. This blurring of imagination and reality was most evident when one day, in the early 1980’s as a 16-year old, I was submerged in the novel ‘War and Peace’ by Leo Tolstoi.
I was reading about a riveting war scene when I looked out of my bedroom window and saw our wide expanse of lawn strewn with men in uniform. I had such a fright that I dove (is ‘dove’ really a word?!) right under my bed, my heart beating wildly…
It took some time, before I was able to rationalize myself into reality again:
This was the time in South Africa when the Apartheid government had convinced all of us ‘whites’ that the Communists were busy brainwashing the ‘poor blacks’ into taking over our Christian country so that they could rule. Since there was a war raging on South Africa’s borders, and ‘terrorists’ had made their appearance in rural farm areas, the local ‘commandos’ (volunteer farmer-soldiers) were staging inspection visits to every farm to see if the homestead was secured against ‘terrorist’ attacks. So the men in uniform on our lawn were part of one of those commandos that had earmarked our farm for inspection that day!
Needless, to say, our home was redlined as perfectly ‘terrorist-friendly’- we had no security fencing or window guards whatsoever; my parents regularly forgot to lock the doors at night and we all slept with windows open to allow in fresh air. Our ‘watchdogs’ were my beloved ‘Goldie’ – a toy-pom who couldn’t catch a ‘terrorist’ even if she had been fed steroids and ‘Rommel’ a mangrel mix of something and the other, who unlike his German general namesake, would run to hide under the kitchen table if any stranger should turn to look at him.
And just to clarify what I wrote above about ‘communists’ and ‘terrorists’: we all now know that the ‘poor blacks’ were in factly deeply wronged and fighting against Apartheid out of their own accord and true moral right and that what we (highly patronizing) ‘whites’ were made to believe were ‘terrorists’ were really ‘Freedom Fighters’ who have liberated South Africa from a terrible, racist regime. When I came to discover this a few years later in 1986, while in Germany, I felt as if I had been living on the wrong side of the Matrix up to that time of my life!
I digress…
But purposefully. I wanted to tell you this story to illustrate how easy it is to let ourselves be distracted by our imagination and the incredible mass of information around us. And that is not even counting the incredible convincing powers of a whinging child or a tempting husband… And then, the desk full of bills and cash slips that create a dull throbbing in your head each time you lift your eyes from your work…
Respect your time!
And teach others to respect it.
You only have a limited resource of time and you cannot ‘catch up’ on time ever. Time wasted is time lost.
I fully understand that an 18-year olds’ understanding of time is markedly different from that of a 40-plusser. But that is why I am writing this blog and why you are reading it: to share a better understanding of how to achieve your goals, regardless of your age.
And if you want to fulfil your dreams you will need to wake up to the reality that time is a key factor. During the time that you have set aside to work towards your goal, whether this is to study or to work from home, stick to the following rules:
- Switch off the television set. If you just can’t live without your favourite shows, then schedule time in your daily plan for them, but keep the TV switched off in between.
Set you mobile phone to ‘Silent’ and ask people to send Text messages instead of leaving messages on voicemail. Then call back in the hour you’ve set aside for phone calls in your daily programme. - Log out of Facebook! Don’t keep it open while you’re working. Log in for a scheduled time, do what you need to do and log out again.
- Close your email Inbox. This is the biggest time-killer of them all. Just open it on one or two specific times a day, prioritise the influx of mail (Delete, Read or Action). The more you delete, the less you read and the sooner you get into a habit of setting aside a specific time for taking action, within your daily programme, the quicker you will become the Master of Email instead of the grovelling slave.
- Ask your family to ‘get with the programme’: Sit down with your nearest and dearest and explain to them that, while you still love them as much as ever and still want to spend as much quality time with them as possible, you have taken a decision to take control of your time, in order to achieve your goals. And this means that they need to respect your time and let you focus on the work you need to do in order to make this happen.
Explain to them about your ‘DMO’ – your Daily Mode of Operation and that in every day there is special time set aside to spend with them, to discuss issues with them and to just be together. Also, point out that every weekend you are going to make a concerted effort to focus on them and do something that they would love to do together with you. Work out a time together on the weekend which they would prefer for this activity: Saturday morning, afternoon or evening? And make sure to calm them down about Sundays: Sundays is a day of rest and from now on they will never have to pull you away from your computer on this day again, because you will be there to have time for them and enjoy a restful day together with them.
Don’t feel disheartened if you’re met by an unbelieving stare and a snicker. Taking control of your life involves teaching everyone around you to also take control of theirs – at least as a sign of respect to you. Also, if your previous behaviour has been anything but systematic, planned and organized, you will need to earn that respect by proving through your new way of doing things, that you have adopted a new DMO!
Of course, having a plan and sticking to it rigorously also always means being flexible enough to understand when you simply have to change it to accommodate new or unknown data. Don’t become so focused on your life and your goals, that you neglect the needs of the loved ones around you. If the man or child in your life really needs some TLC, get up, make him or it a cup of coffee or a hot chocolate and be available to listen to him or her. But if this happens too often during your working hours, you will have to set aside time one weekend to talk this through until both of you are on the ‘same page’.
You’ll be surprised how much support you will get over time from your family if you keep them involved in your progress, and if they realize that actually, life has become better for all of you, because you are all now better at valuing time.
PS: If you’re in a job that takes all of your time, and does not respect your family’s or your personal needs for time, make a decision to get out of it. Look at www.reinedelarose.com for some inspiration and practical steps on how to achieve this.
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