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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Darrell Darnell, Dwight is my favorite character on The Office, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living.
I never watched The Office when it originally aired but instead watched it on streaming a few years ago. Now it seems like there’s an episode of The Office on at our house at some point nearly every day. We all love it and it never gets old.
In season 2 there’s an episode called, “The Fight.” In that episode we’re told that Michael, the office manager, has to sign certain documents at the end of each week, each month, and each quarter. Once per year those line up to be the same day, and when that day comes, Michael does all he can to avoid the task.
Once the documents are signed they have to be overnighted to the corporate office, and the last pickup for overnight shipments is 7pm. Therefore, Michael will wait until the last moment he can, doing anything possible to avoid the task, even keeping his staff at the office until nearly 7 because for reasons I’m not sure of, none of them can leave until the documents are signed. Obviously, they are not pleased by this.
As the clock approaches 6:30, none of the documents have been signed and Michael is still coming up with ways to avoid the task. He tells his staff to sign the documents themselves and forge his name. And that’s exactly what they do so the job can get done and they can go home.
I’d accuse Michael of being the worst procrastinator ever, except I can identify way too much with his behavior. Maybe you can identify with it too. In fact, maybe we should start our own procrastinators anonymous group. They say the first step to recovery is acknowledging you have a problem so here goes: My name is Darrell Darnell and I’m a procrastinator. Feel free to acknowledge your procrastinating too if it seems fitting.
For me, I find myself procrastinating mostly around one of two types of tasks. Those tasks are anything related to invoicing and anything related to writing.
By writing, I mean everything from a simple follow up email to a more involved email campaign, and even writing SILY episodes. For invoicing, I mean anything that involves creating or proofing invoicing my clients.
When I find myself facing one of these tasks, I find myself behaving painfully similarly to Michael Scott. Rather than work on invoices, I’ll tell myself that I’ll watch a short YouTube video first. I’ll then find a video that’s less than 10 minutes, watch it at 2x speed and then…I don’t do the invoices. Instead, I’ll wonder if the mail has come yet and walk outside to check it. Then I’ll go check on my wife and see how she’s doing. Suddenly I notice I’m thirsty and head off to the kitchen for a drink. Once I’m back at my office, I decide I need to watch another video before I proceed with the invoices.
The worst is those days where I look at the clock and it’s nearing 5pm. I typically work until 5:30 or 6:00, so by that time I’m down to just the time needed to complete the task. Faced with no other option, I’ll complete the task. At dinner, my Kari will ask me how may day went, and I’ll lament about how I wasted it by procrastinating. It’s a horrible, embarrassing feeling.
Am I alone in this? Can you identify with my story at all?
Here’s what I’ve learned.
Procrastination like this is the worst kind. What I mean is, this is the kind of procrastination that not only puts off a task that only takes a relatively few number of minutes, but it causes you to lose all the productivity of a day in the process! Sure, I do small tasks or items throughout the day, so it’s not a total loss, but when it hits me like this I lose about 75% of the day.
Over the years I’ve discovered several things that help me overcome this battle, and I hope they’ll help you too.
First, I reach out for support in three ways. When I know that I’m facing a task on a certain day that I know has the potential to get me caught in a procrastination loop, I tell my wife. I always see her mid-morning, lunch, and mid-afternoon. She’ll also come into my office at random times throughout the day. Each time we see each other, she’ll ask me how my task is coming along, holding me accountable for staying focused and on task.
Sometimes I have a task that I know can be a procrastination magnet but it’s not due on a specific day. In this case, I’ll tell my mastermind about it and put it on my weekly accountability list. I absolutely hate coming back to them the next week with a task left undone, so this gives me the motivation to do the task before I meet with them again.
The third way I utilize support is by outsourcing the tasks I know cause me to procrastinate. I’ve made it clear that I hate invoicing. Currently, this task takes nearly an entire day to complete and it’s been that way for years. I put off assigning this task to someone else for years because I was afraid to share that part of my business.
Finally about three or four years ago I let it go and trained one of my team members to do the task. The relief I now have knowing that it’s off my shoulders and is being handled by one of my amazing team members is tremendous. I still have a few invoices each month that I have to review or put together myself, but these often take less than 30 minutes and I rarely find myself procrastinating to do it.
So I encourage you to explore ways that you can help those around you keep you accountable, on task, and even helping you carry the workload.
When it comes to writing, I take a slightly different approach. For invoicing, I discovered that I procrastinate because I hate doing that task. For writing, I realized that I put it off because I often don’t know where to start.
When an email comes in, I need to think about how to respond, so I’ll put it off. If I have a big job that requires a proposal, it seems overwhelming like trying to eat an elephant. Likewise, for SILY episodes, I can feel like Chevy Chase from Funny Farm staring at a blank sheet not knowing how to even get the first word out of my head, irritated by the noise of animals next door.
To overcome these obstacles, I’ve put together a series of tools and resources. Many emails I receive require a very similar response. Years ago I purchased a text expander tool for my computer. I use one called aText. This allows me to put together an entire email response and save it. Then when I want to use that response, I simply type a specific string of characters, typically 4 or 5 letters, and the entire email is written, pulled from my saved copy in aText. If necessary, I can make a few quick tweaks before sending it off.
When it comes to proposals, they can be very long with multiple sections, pages, and legal jargon. Over the years I’ve created a few templates for these too. Some of them I use weekly, others I use only a few times per year. But in each case, the templates keep me from figuring out where to start or what to write. For the template I use weekly, I can get a 6-8 page proposal out to a client in less than 15 minutes. For the template I only use a few times per year that’s full of legal jargon, I can get that out the door in 30-45 minutes.
For SILY, I take a different approach. Each one of these is written from scratch except for the intro and outro (which I have an aText shortcut to assist me with). I have found that instead of sitting down at the computer and trying to craft a story, I pre-write it in my head over the course of a week. Each week I look ahead to what I will be writing the next week, and then I think about that episode little bits at a time.
I think about how I want to start the episode and set the hook. Another time I’ll think through the real-life moments that led up to the episode. In this step I’ll often close my eyes and imagine the events. I’ll describe them in my mind as if I’m typing them out on screen. Sometimes I’ll also talk to others involved with the story to get more details.
As the week goes on I’ll think about how I want to tie it all together and at which point in the episode I’ll insert my trademark “here’s what I learned” line. I also think about what my fun fact will be to start the episode.
By following this method, I’ve found that most of the time I’ve already eaten most of the elephant by the time I sit down to write. The episode just flows out in a single session in about 2 hours, sometimes 3 hours.
To summarize, I’ve discovered that if I break the task into smaller pieces and work on those pieces in some way throughout the week, the final assembly is straightforward and rarely causes further procrastination. Figuring out where to start was the piece of the puzzle causing me to falter, and my process has made it clear where to start.
Time is a valuable resource that we can never get back. With that in mind, I hope this episode will help you make the most of it, and through your work, the world will be a better place.
I’m Darrell Darnell, and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
I want you to be a part of the next Monday Mailbag on July 29th! Monday Mailbag is your opportunity to Share what YOU’VE learned, so that other listeners and I can learn from YOU. It can be a message as short as 30 seconds or several minutes long. It really doesn’t matter just as long as it’s something that will benefit others. You can send in questions or responses to my SILY episodes, and I’ll respond to them via Monday Mailbag episodes. You can participate in Monday Mailbags by visiting the Golden Spiral Media listener feedback page.