chapter five, part two

Continuing Chapter Five: Do-Nothingism: How to Beat It

Here are the first two suggested methods for beating do-nothingism:

1) Write a Daily Activity Schedule.

In the morning, write out a schedule for your day. Your first column write the time by hours. In the second column, write down your prospective activities (what you want or plan to do). In the third column, write down your retrospective activities (what you actually did during that hour). In the fourth column, mark whether the activity you did was M for mastery (a chore or something you don't want to do) or P for pleasure (something you do for fun) and then rate the activity between 0 and 5 on how much pleasure you gained or how difficult the task was to accomplish. Keep it up for a week.

2) Make an Antiprocrastination Sheet.

This is for getting through one task you don't want to do. An example I'll use for this is cleaning my desk, which is something I hate doing because it seems to be really hard, at least in my mind. First, write down the date. Then, in the first column of your chart, write down the small Activities you need to do to accomplish the big task (in my case, clean the top shelf of the desk, the bottom shelf of the desk, the filing cabinet top, and then wipe everything down.) In the second column, write down your Predicted Difficulty between 0 and 100%. In the third column, write down your Predicted Satisfaction between 0 and 100%. Then do your task. In the fourth column write down the Actual Difficulty of doing the task between 0 and 100%. In the fifth column write down the Actual Satisfaction of doing the task between 0 and 100%. See if there's a difference between what you predicted and what actually happened for your difficulty and satisfaction levels.

More tomorrow.