Book Summary: Procrastinate On Purpose
Rory Vaden’s book Procrastinate On Purpose examines the 5 ways we can make better use of our time as well as presenting useful advice on how best to incorporate the strategies into our daily lives.
Book Summary Notes: Procrastinate On Purpose
- Do you believe busyness is a badge of honour?
- Everyday we can spend up to 5 hours on things like household chores/eating and getting dressed.
- Often ‘busyness’ can make us feel important. Far more than what we are actually trying to accomplish does.
- One advantage that true productivity masters share is that they don’t waste time complaining about how busy they are, they just get on with it.
- Accepting the busy day ahead can also help to manage anxiety levels, you know its going to be busy so why worry about it? Worry only adds to the concern.
- Part of success can be simply waiting for the right moment to act. Having the patience to wait can be quite difficult though.
- Patience also allows you to adapt as a situation changes. So procrastination in this regard can be very useful.
- Focus your attention on your priorities. Not only should you take the time to make sure that only the essential occupies your daily tasks, but you also need to make sure you know which of these tasks is the most valuable and prioritise your time and energy accordingly.
- Making a schedule for your time can be powerful for helping to allow you to get your most important tasks done. The author’s company found that less than 10% of regular people use a written plan for allocating their time each day, however, of people considered top performers this number rose to 85%.
Elimination Is Key
- Stop thinking of ways to add to your life. Instead focus on what you can remove.
- Accept the fact that sometimes we bog ourselves down with trivial activities simply to feel a sense of satisfaction when they are all done and ticked off our list.
- Switch to focus on your results, are all of your tasks moving you towards your goal or simply taking up time?
- Are all of your tasks absolutely required to be performed by you? Can you delegate some and keep most if not all of the effectiveness?
- After removing the ones that are unnecessary and delegating those that you can, hopefully you have a more clear picture of what it is you should actually be spending your time on.
- Success is less about the quantity of tasks completed and more about the quality of inputs towards your goals those tasks created.
- Still busy? Do you have some low hanging fruit to take advantage of? The typical American spends 34 hours a week watching TV, what would happen to your goals if you went without TV for a month as an experiment?
- Are there any of your tasks that you can automate? Recurring delivery for groceries each week for example or perhaps hiring someone once a month to clean or tidy your living space?
