Up With The "P" Word! Use High Payoff Procrastination Today!

You know that task sitting over there, on the corner of your desk? Yeah, the one you've been avoiding... Or should I say, the one that's been pre-occupying your mind, distracting you from getting anything else done effectively... The one you're not getting solved but you're sure having a lot of mental chatter about.

Back in the days when I was in the Big 8 consulting world (or was it Big 6, 5, 4...) I had to write reports for clients. For hours at a time I was combing through the results of our team's analytical work and turning it into narrative explanations to support the recommendations we were making.

Some of these documents ran for 100s of pages. And, as is natural when working with language, there were times where a written discussion ground to a halt. I just couldn't come up with the 'right words' to use. Aggravating as all get out! Sitting there staring at black ink on a white screen with my progress utterly stalled.

One part of my mind was as blank as the screen while at the same time I was berating myself for not coming up with better language, not moving on to the next thing I knew I had to get to, not willing to give up on sitting there until it was done - and a flood of inner critical chat having a party inside my head!

I really wanted to escape from the assignment and I'm smart... I figured out a great way to 'get away' from it.

I was one of the rare folks who had a Macintosh computer at that time, and on my Mac I had a game called Tetris. This program dropped shapes composed of four blocks from the top of the screen and there was limited time to use key strokes to change the orientation of the object before it touched down. The object was to create a full horizontal line of blocks so that they'd flash and disappear. The more times the player succeeded, that faster the program ran... until the only possible way to succeed was to get into a Zen-like state where the hands moved faster on the keys than a thinking mind could direct them.

So there I was, sitting at my desk, looking like I was intently 'working'... yet doing something that had nothing to do with writing a report.

And a funny thing happened ~ the perfect words for that sentence showed up from some corner of my mind.

The first time it happened I was startled and grateful and wrote down the sentence that showed up with such clarity.

The second time it occurred, I noticed that I'd had myself really focused on the game.

As you can imagine, my inner critic started having a field day.

"You're not supposed to be playing games! Your'e at work! You're just masquerading here! What if someone catches on that you're goofing around?"

I'm nothing if not stubborn, even in the face of my own inner critic.

The next time I got stuck for language, I deliberately played the game and tracked how long it took for the phenomenon to produce the result.

Instead of wasting hours writing lousy language that wandered uselessly in circles and made a mess of ideas, and re-working it to death for even more time, I could shift to 15 minutes of Tetris and have a cogent sentence present itself with complete clarity!

And my inner chat evaporated and the momentum on my next task was focused and undistracted.

In fact, I decided to turn this amazing procrastination process on deliberately. I'd look at the information gathered, reading through it thoroughly, and then turn on the program and let my subconscious work it's magic, and let me know the key ideas to bring out or a key point to describe in the report.

Then I started telling everyone else in my group what I noticed, and asked them to try it for themselves.

Guess what? Same result!

This experience is one of the ones that spurred me to study how our minds and consciousness operate and start deliberately using tools that leverage them. And now I teach them to my clients so they can boost their own effectiveness.

I discovered that procrastination is an outward signal that the approach you and I are taking on a task may in fact be getting in the way of leveraging the rest of our mind's ability to join in and solve things - sometimes much faster than expected.

I uncovered four other techniques that work superbly for me and I now use them all the time and teach them in my coaching forums.

So join me and put up a placard above your desk and cheerfully use High Payoff Procrastination today!

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