Give Yourself Less Time
Are fretting over a project that you really want to do, but you simply can’t seem to get around to adding it to your schedule in order to complete it? The problem may be that you’re giving yourself too much time to get the project done. Try giving yourself less time to get it done!
People talk about their big dream projects which they think will take a ton of time (perhaps even a lifetime) to accomplish and then don’t put it on their schedule to work on. Which means it never gets done (and perhaps never even gets started at all).
It’s okay to have big project that need to be broken into phases in order to complete — but if you’re so overwhelmed by the size of the project as a whole that you’re too intimidated to break it into smaller more manageable pieces and then schedule those pieces on your calendar and block out the time required to work on the project (even just a little bit) at least once per week — then I doubt how serious you really were when you told me how important this project was to you.
A technique I’ve always found helpful in getting my important projects completed was to give myself a ridiculously short deadline.
Think about how much stuff you get done on the day before you leave for vacation. You are in full-on productivity mode! You get more projects off your desk by 5pm that day than any other time during the year — because you gave yourself a very finite amount of time to get through the work on your desk because you had a firm stop date/time.
What if you took your biggest, most time intensive project and cut the time you set aside to work on it in half?
What if you only gave yourself the afternoon to finish a project that you knew would take all weekend to compete?
What if you wouldn’t let yourself get out of bed in the morning (not even to go pee!) until you wrote at least one chapter of that book you’ve been telling everyone that you want to write?
What ridiculously short deadline can you give yourself in order to achieve some ridiculously impressive results?
