Lose the Snooze!

And a hand raises out of the blanket and hits the snooze button. And there goes another day appeasing the snooze genes within us.

Despite how much we tend to be aware and averse to procrastination, almost all of us have been victims or rather culprits of the crime.

Be it that tough task we save for the last or cleaning up that messy wardrobe put off for another weekend, or the deep cleaning of the kitchen deferred to infinity. What is it that makes us move from one deadline to the other?

After much analysis and thought spent, I realize that it is our amazing skill to convince ourselves of relative priorities of the tasks at hand. When we hate doing a task, we lower its priority. We tend to find something more important to do, or more urgent to address. What has been avoided, continues to be avoided successfully. And the cycle continues. I have umpteen examples of how this works in the office set up. Like that mandatory training that must be completed, the quarterly feedback email waiting in your inbox or the employee engagement survey that awaits your feedback. That difficult discussion with your reportee on his areas of improvement. And the list goes on.

The problem with this approach to working is that it lacks challenges. It makes us complacent in our comfort zone. We tend to go along without pushing our limits, thereby turning us into slaves of ease.

On introspection I discovered that our unique skill of conviction can turn around this situation as well. It’s all about how you articulate the task to yourself. For example, one can frame the task to make better sense and convey a benefit to the brain. The human brain likes benefits, and it can be coded to work towards benefits.

First, we must begin by articulating each task with an associated benefit. Like completing that mandatory training will contribute to the annual training hours. The annual survey values your feedback and will help make the work place better for you. The brain understands positive benefit driven language better than a simple task-based information.

Next, break down the task into smaller simpler achievable events. Each completed event acts as a motivator to move to the next step and achieve more.

My mentor, a very wise man, gave me a mantra once. “Put all your tasks for a day in a list in order of their current priority. And start executing them in the same order. Promise yourself that you will not skip any tasks and go through the list in order.”

At that moment I thought it was easy, but now I am wiser. It needed discipline and a strong will against the ease of “let’s defer.”

A friend once told me, “How we do some things is how we do most things.”

So, if you think its only that snooze button in the morning, think again. You may discover there is much more than that snooze happening. Its time to lose the snooze, re-code instructions to the brain, discipline yourself and get to working on that list in order.

Cheers to achieving much more!