beating_the_procrastination.htm

It takes a special kind of guy or gal to be an independent businessperson. You’ve got to be motivated, disciplined, a self-starter, and the kind of person who doesn’t need a boss looking over your shoulder all the time to stay on top of your projects. I have lost count of how many times I have heard my regular career friends say stuff like: “Jeez, Peter, I don’t know how you do it. You must be really disciplined to get so much work done on your own.”

And you know what? I am. But nobody said it was easy.

The truth is, when you’re your own boss, the motivation that drives you to complete jobs on time or to produce your very best work has to come from someplace deep within yourself--not from someone else. Your desire to do your very best or your desire to please your clients or simply your desire to eat (when you’re an independent businessperson, one axiom in particular rules your life: If you don’t work, you don’t get paid) has to be stronger than your desire to watch the Young and the Restless or to sit in a bar drinking a few beers with your buddies or to sleep your day away in a hammock on a beach at the Cape.

In my case, a cash-sucking family of five--with weekend bowling leagues, hula lessons, ice skating, dance recitals, baby gymnastics, and a summer vacation chock-full of day camps, kinder-seminars, quick trips to the San Diego Zoo, Legoland, Sea World, and oh, so much more--keeps my nose planted quite firmly on the grindstone. I am quite intimately familiar with the above axiom, and it’s never very far from my mind.

But make no mistake about it: despite my apparent workaholic ways, I can procrastinate along with the best of them. When I was in college, I was the king of the all-nighters—waiting until the very last minute possible before the Big Test to crack open a book. Then it was one big caffeine-fest from dusk until dawn—setting up camp in the physics library (the place to hang out when you were serious about studying) until just minutes before the start of the exam.

Gee, that kind of sounds like the way I get things done now.

So, what is it with this procrastination thing anyway? Why do so many of us tend to put work off until the last minute or, in some cases, never get around to doing it at all? Well, I’m no shrink (although I used to play one on TV), but I suspect that a few different things might be at work here, a couple of which tend to be deep within the mental workings of an independent businessperson.

First of all, being successful on your own requires structure. You have to be able to design and build an organized work life all by yourself, without someone else telling you what to do, when to do it, and who to do it with. This means establishing regular work hours, setting up a workspace that is conducive to getting work done, maintaining systems for tracking (and adhering to) project deadlines, and the other kinds of things that make a business hum. While we all know people who are so far over the top organizationally that they have every minute of every day planned out in their little Palm Pilots, for others of us, creating structure in our work lives (or in our personal lives, for that matter) just isn’t in our genetic code.

Without a structured work life, it’s natural to put things off or to forget about them altogether. While pushing your own internal deadlines out from time to time is no big deal--that’s part of what being your own boss is all about—if you find yourself missing lots of external and client deadlines, then that’s a sure sign that procrastination is getting the best of you, and you need to spruce up your structure.

Second, there are psychological issues that can make some of us push tasks off until later. Here’s one: the fear of failure. What better way to avoid failure than to put off or avoid doing the task, project, or job that in your imagination might go down in flames right before your very eyes? To this day--although I’ve written more books than I can even remember (actually, I don’t know if it’s really because there are so many books, or because there are so few brain cells remaining)--before I type the first few pages of a new book, I’m filled with dread that I’m not going to be able to pull it off. The only thing that keeps me from punting the whole thing and running and hiding out in the woods is my knowledge that this is a natural (and inevitable) phase that all my projects go through, and that if I just start working on the project (instead of fretting about it), everything will eventually work out just fine. Usually.

There’s another psychological issue that may be at the root of that dreaded procrastination thing: maybe you just don’t want to do what you’re doing. Huh? How could that be? Isn’t this business opportunity supposed to be the greatest thing since sliced bread? Sure, for many people it is. But only if you’re doing the work that you’re not just good at, but that you truly love.

Take a deep look inside yourself and ask yourself if you’re doing the kind of work that you really want to do. Just as I felt pressure from my peers when I was in college to become a doctor, lawyer, or engineer, our boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives, parents, friends, and others may be subtly pressuring us to do the kind of work they think we ought to do—not what we really want to do. Don’t forget: you’re the one who’s in charge. You can decide to be whatever you want to be. As my favorite line from the "Rocky Horror Picture Show" goes, “Don’t dream it; be it.”

Anyway, whether or not you’re able to get past the structural and the psychological dynamics that lead to procrastination, here’s a tip the next time you find yourself putting off your work:

Every project that runs more than a day or so has one or more natural break points. These are the gaps that separate the completion of one discrete portion of work from the beginning of another. Instead of stopping when you hit a break point, keep working well past it—enough so that you’re immersed in the next portion of work before you stop. When you come back to the job, you’ll be able to dive right in, whereas starting back at a break point often leads to lots of hemming and hawing before you dive into the next portion of work. Give it a try. I think you’ll find it helps.

Being an independent businessperson—especially a successful independent businessperson--requires a lot of self-discipline, and it means that you’ve got to learn some new skills, skills that weren’t as necessary when you had a boss watching your every move. If you find yourself more often than not saying "mañana"—tomorrow—when it comes to getting your work done, then don’t just sit there. Do something about it! There’s one thing for sure: if you don’t, no one else will!

Article by Peter Economy. Peter is Associate Editor of Leader to Leader magazine and coauthor of the books Home-Based Business For Dummies, Raising Capital For Dummies, and the upcoming book Why Aren’t You Your Own Boss? Visit him at his Web site: www.petereconomy.com