Sit up a Tree

“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”

Henry Ford

It’s amazing how we set ourselves up for a fall later on.  In many ways what we are doing when we procrastinate is that we are being weasels to out future self, putting off something now to gain an immediate pleasure only to make things harder for ourselves down the line.  It’s a form of stealing, except the person you are stealing from is yourself.

But it can get much worse than just procrastinating.  With most forms of procrastination you are simply putting off a task that you will eventually have to do.  In the meantime the task doesn’t get any bigger, it just remains undone.  However, there are some types of procrastination that makes things much worse for our future-selves. 

For example, let’s say that you have set yourself an exercise regime or a drawn up a revision timetable.  Initially you follow your regime or timetable but a day comes along and you don’t feel up to it for one reason for another and you choose to take a break.  OK, nothing wrong with that, but the problem comes when you decide that, in exchange for having a break today, you’re going to do twice as much exercise/revision tomorrow to catch up.  That’s a sure-fire way to make you loathe the idea of tomorrow coming around!

You are being a weasel to yourself!  Why?  Because in order to have some pleasure today, you’re burdening your future-self with twice the normal workload.

If you find yourself doing this then ask yourself the following:

• Is this a fair thing to do to do to your future-self? 
• Is it a realistic thing to do?  Are you actually going to do twice as much work tomorrow or are you just kidding yourself?
• Does the trade-off of not doing whatever it is today in exchange for doing twice as much tomorrow seem worthwhile?
• How would you feel if someone else lumbered you with double the workload tomorrow?

Having asked yourself these questions you might decide that you’re not going to take a day off from whatever it is you were going to put off.  Alternatively, you might still choose to have a break.  Whatever you do, at least you will have chose to do it consciously, as opposed to doing it without thinking about the consequences!

Want to improve your life?  There’s one thing that you can do that, above anything else, will help you to move your life in the direction that you want it to go rather than the direction it’s going in automatically – set goals.

In later posts I’ll go into greater depth about the various aspects of goal setting, but for now I’ll cover the basics of the process .

Most people set goals, the problem is that they do it once and year at New Year’s and then forget about them for the rest of the year.  They get to the next new year and wonder why they haven’t achieved their goals.

There are some simple steps that you should follow in order to successfully set goals:

• Goals must be written down.  Spoken or thought goals just don’t have the “Ooomph!” that written goals do.
•  Be honest.  Make sure that the goals are your goals and not someone else’s goals.
• Don’t feel the need to be realistic.  Write your goals (especially long-term goals) with the attitude that anything is possible!  Have fun!
• Have different goals for different aspects of your life – family, business, health, money …
• Spend a fixed amount of time on each of your goal areas (say 5 minutes each for family, business, etc) and write for the entire time.  Don’t pause to think – Just write!
• After you’re done writing, go back and review your goals and pick out the top 5/10 goals.
• Put a timescale to your top 5/10 goals.  Highlight your 1 year goals, your 3 year goals, 5 year goals and 10 year goals.
• For each of your top goals, write a couple of sentences on why you MUST achieve them!  This is your motivation for pursuing them.
• Write down (and then carry out) one action that you can take in the next 24 hours to bring you closer to achieving your goals.