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Back in the days when I was employed by a corporation, trading hours for dollars and slaving away my existence, we used to have a phrase around the office. When you think about it, it was the ultimate “employee mentality” in the worst form. In fact, it was evidence of a deadly disease, corroding our very souls, and oozing out of our intellects, infecting everyone we came in contact with. The phrase we proudly (if not ignorantly) spouted was this: “Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?”
Do you feel it? Did your skin crawl when you read that? Did the hair on the back of your neck stand up? Did your blood boil a little, and did you just want to shout, “NO!” and set me back to task?
If not, you, too, may be infected with this malady.
It is not uncommon. In fact, if you look closely I bet you will see the devastation of this despicable disorder everywhere you look! The indications of this infectious illness are all around us. The neighbor’s yard piled high with junk and overgrown with weeds. Your coworker’s office with papers everywhere. Your child’s incomplete book report, the book only half read. And heaven forbid that I talk about the pot belly I have noticed that you have added in the five years since you last visited the gym. And all of these things crying out to be dealt with and completed … QUICK!
But our universal condition often gets the best of us. Let’s just call it what it is. We PROCRASTINATE. “I don’t need to do it now, I can do it later. There is always tomorrow.” Besides, we have better things to do, right? We have places to go, people to see, things to do. We’re so busy. The kids have practice, the boss has yet another project, the TV has reruns!
And so, we go from day to day managing our lives on the perception that ‘someday’ we’ll get to that. Someday I will learn to play the oboe. Someday I’ll take my kids to the park they love to go to. Someday I will start my own business. And most of the time we manage a series of minor crises in our lives because we wait and wait until the last possible minute, and then hurry to complete what we should have started hours, or days, perhaps even weeks or months ago, all the while justifying it to ourselves by saying, “I work better under pressure.” (The Zoloft prescription helps a little, too.)
Every once in a while that someday really does become today. Occasionally we really do stand up and make something happen. For me it was moving from the world of corporate employment to self employment. I spent months preparing for the change, or so I thought. I trained, I studied, I got licensed, I was mentored, I practiced, and then I jumped. The only problem was I hadn’t yet changed my mindset! You see, the same stinking thinking I had as an employee came with me, only now I was the boss, the owner and the CFO. It didn’t hurt me when I was an employee … but now I took it in the chin. I gave it to the man, and the man was me.
Oh, at first I pressed in, worked late hours, took no prisoners. I felt new again, as if a capitalistic chemotherapy had cleansed my body of the unconscious cancer. But after a while, the disease reared its ugly head. Once again, I began to think, I don’t need to do that right now, I have time. “Those continuing education credits aren’t due until license renewal anyway, and that is still two months off!” Then I found myself desperately trying to complete all 24 credit hours through online courses the week my license renewal was due. And some of my customers started to suffer a little, when I could have requested medical records at the time of application, but thought, I’ll wait and see if underwriting really needs them or not. It became fatal when I started to think, “I don’t need to call those prospects today, after all it is a Friday before a holiday weekend, they probably aren’t in the office anyway.”
I remember once hearing an interview with a well known CEO of a failed business. When asked how his company had gone into bankruptcy and his financial life into ruins, he answered, “It happened little by little, then all of a sudden in a hurry!”
And this is the truth, friends. This is why real leaders must cleanse themselves daily of this pervasive and perverse paradigm known as procrastination. I’ll let you in on a little secret! THERE IS NO TOMORROW. Not for real leaders, anyway. Because they know that whatever they don’t finish today will ruin them tomorrow! Little by little it creeps in, innocently at first, diabolically after, and then suddenly, in a hurry, we lose everything. Do you get it?
So what crossroad do you stand at today? What is it that you have been putting off in your business? You may have a choice to make. Do I get it done right now, and profit from it? Or do I put it off, wait until some later opportunity, and potentially find myself in ruins as a result? I would like to make a suggestion – don’t wait. Do it today. Make whatever sacrifice it takes to get it done now, and while I can’t promise you riches as a result, I can tell you that your odds of success are incredibly increased, and if nothing else, your soul will be free of the inexorable infection of procrastination.
Here are some steps you must take if you want to find success and avoid the death grip of procrastination:
1. Take a little time and write down your goals. This sounds basic, yet only 3 percent of people do this. Lot’s of people have goals, but very few of them commit them to paper. And studies have proven that those who do tend to be far more successful than those who do not. So write out the goals you have for your business over the next month, year, and at least out to five years. Commit them to paper, and then write a business plan to define how you will achieve these goals.
2. Once you have the goals defined the task of prioritization begins. This is a difficult step for most people. The most important part of this step is to define those tasks that are most critical to the success of your business. As a sales professional, I knew that of all the things I could be doing (writing letters, defining financial strategies, balancing portfolios, developing seminars) the most important thing to my business was the phone calls I made to prospective clients. So that task had to be number one, everything else could wait until that had been completed.
3. Define the purpose of this priority task! The reason you are doing something is more important than the act of doing it. One of the most common mistakes that sales professionals make is to give in to the temptation to provide quotes over the phone, and answer a prospect’s questions, when they should be making more phone calls. The desperation sometimes sets in, and someone showing interest on the phone feels like a bird in the hand, so to speak. But the purpose of the time making these phone calls is to schedule appointments, not to sell products or services. Do you see the difference? The real disappointment is that after you have spent an hour or more with this prospect on the phone, they may decide not to come in to see you after all. And the thirty or forty other phone calls you sacrificed to answer those questions are lost, and that hour can never be regained. So, don’t let anything come between you and the purpose of the task at hand.
4. Revisit your goals regularly, and adjust as needed. This doesn’t mean you should modify your goals to fit your behavior! If you are slipping back into old habits, by all means, fix that first. But you do need to have a reality check and when necessary make adjustments to the goals. Maybe you were unrealistic and needed two months instead of one to set up that marketing campaign. Or, perhaps you should have set your sights on 3 seminars instead of just one this quarter. Allow yourself the flexibility to realign your goals with the success or struggles you are experiencing.
There is only one thing left to do from here – Act. And that is not just a quip. You would be amazed at how many people will read this article and then say, “Sure, I’ll do that; tomorrow.” But one thing that makes true leaders stand out is their ability to make decisions and then to act on them quickly.
write by Olwen