To the classic Russian questions “What to do?” and «Who’s to blame?» a third was added: “How to stop being lazy?”.
Fine! How to motivate yourself to real and, most importantly, regular actions to plan and analyze the effectiveness of time use?
The effects of time management training have the nasty habit of dissolving like stitches after surgery.
Because these effects did not germinate from within, the pressure of the habits of the entire pre-training life will still prevail.
A certain mechanism is needed that would serve as both a “motivator” and a “reminder”. So to speak, «On the Head of the Knocker.»
So, let’s get down to putting this mechanism into practice.
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1. We make such a sign:
2. We take a pencil and a pen (just a pen, and nothing else!) We shade the years we have lived, as well as the past days of the current year. Fatty so we shade, with feeling, really, with arrangement. Maybe with memories. “Ah, this 1991… Golden time, the dawn of Russian capitalism…”
3. With a simple pencil, we write the main goals under the sign (it’s better not to press too hard, anyway, you’ll have to erase later).
4. We put on the desktop.
5. Every day in the morning we cross out half of the square of the current day, and in the evening — the whole square. And so every day.
It is very important that the pinarik calendar is in front of your eyes for most of the day. That’s it, at the beginning of the introduction of “self-management” technologies into your life, you don’t need to do anything else. Stands for himself and stands pinarik on the table. A day stands, a week, a month. You can change the design — that is, reprint it again, but again, shade everything with pens, without any small-mesh automatic fills there. And let it go on.
Many people who imagined such a contraption for themselves could not stand longer than two months of their former lives. Because time has materialized, because with your own hands you cross out what you have lived every day. But with progress in the goals section, the situation is most often not so optimistic, the dynamics there are completely different.
Of all human inventions, the only thing worse than the nuclear bomb is the clock with a round dial. Yes, and electronic, with numbers, is also no better. Every morning is Groundhog Day. It seems to be all over again. And it seems that it will always be so. But you take a pinarik, look at the decades that have passed with your own hand, at yesterday crossed out, at the whole of January blacked out of life, you look through the goals, think about the line of the upcoming and maybe not very many years … And you say to yourself in capital letters: “ WELL, AND WHAT …?
And then — everything is somehow by itself. Timing, planning, execution, analysis, management, easy and simple. Because it has grown from within, because this unfortunate piece of paper deprives me of the hope that everything will somehow work out. And it won’t work out. Just life will pass. The funny thing is that there is no way to stop this stupid paperwork, this daily thirty-second fuss with a pinarik calendar.
So if you are wondering how to stop being lazy, then you can implement an experiment on self-motivation — you will need one sheet of paper and 30 seconds of time per day. No need to start with detailed timekeeping. The timing results are grains that must fall on the prepared soil. To prepare the soil by timing is the same as to plow the land by bombardment before sowing, and even in December.
There is a time for everything, let a critical mass of motivating factors accumulate. Do you want to take control of your time, but do not want to take a steam bath with accounting and planning? Print yourself a pinarik and decorate it with pens (just pens!) And let him stand before his eyes, he does not ask for food. By marking a box on your calendar every day, you will strive to spend the day more productively. At the end of each day, you will only need to mark whether the day was productive for you, or whether you spent it not very efficiently.
It will take only a couple of minutes and will not require much effort from you. Productive days are marked in green, and not very productive days are marked in red. When working with this calendar, visual statistics of your productivity for the selected period (week, month, year) is available to you. Based on these statistics, you will draw further conclusions …
Good luck in your endeavors!