Effectiveness: Avoiding Procrastination

Effectiveness: Avoiding Procrastination

It is a man’s responsibility to conquer his world.  This involves setting goals, planning, and execution of such plans.  It also involves constantly updating goals and plans, and strategies of execution.

One problem is the setting of goals.  How does one know which goals to choose?  I tend to come from the Stephen Covey School of personal effectiveness, and it has not failed me in the pursuit of long-term goals.  One needs to assess both one’s self and the outside world.  Thus, a man needs to evaluate three things:

• Strengths
• Skills
• Market Needs  

Do not try to make complicated elaborate schemes at this point.  As in war, the simple plans are complicated enough, and a complicated plan has too many facets involving risk management when one is first beginning with this exercise.  Look at this diagram:

This Venn diagram can take you very far, and it helps you to keep things simple.  The Sweet Spot is where your skills are strong, and these skills are in your strength zone and the market demands your skills.  This is the best place to be, and every man needs to pursue the goal of getting in the Sweet Spot if one is to be successful.  The old Biblical concept of “what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul” is implicit in this diagram.

So, do you procrastinate?  This is s signal that this particular thing is not within your strength zone, but you are pursuing it for some reason.  Often it is a dead end job for which we think “we need the money.”  Sometimes it is the pull of family into tasks that are not suited to our nature.  In any case, this usually puts us into the Burnout Zone.  When any market demands of you something you are good at, but for which you have no passion in your soul for it, eventually, you will likely burnout on this task.  Perhaps you should delete this task from your list.  Perhaps you can outsource this task to someone else, or hire someone to do it.  There is a danger in staying in the Burnout Zone too long.  One loses perspective, strength, passion, and one can become depressed.  In fact, being depresses, lacking any physical problems usually, usually has its roots in burnout, and burnout almost always involves doing things outside of our Strength Zone.

What are you to do?  Find out where you are on the diagram above, and draw an arrow from where you are toward the direction of the sweet spot.  Then evaluate your life on how to move in line with this arrow.  And, evaluate yourself every week or so.