I don’t think you should blame your laziness for your impulse to postpone commitments. It’s more likely that you are afraid to face the challenge, afraid of not being able to come to the end without failing in the halfway. It’s natural, but doesn’t have to be routine. When you make a plan (of your week, your month, your career), the fear of failure can even persist, but you have goals to achieve. You have one more reason not to “leave for later”. All you need is a little help to plan your days, and here’s what I suggest you to do: use an automatic timesheet. Not sure how this can help you? Check out:
1. Your time back
An automatic timesheet just need you to click play/pause to work. As you work, it makes estimates of when your to-do list will be all complete. That is, you waste no time with bureaucratic work and still find out what actually consumes your focus: two prerequisites to plan instead of postponing your commitments. Remember that you will have one of the worst regrets of your career if one day you realize that two, five, ten years passed and all you did was repeating the same work. Just retire the old timesheet of your company, which sooner or later becomes unusual, once you and your team prefer to go on to the next task rather than entering the time you spent.
2. Reached goals
I don’t doubt that you have a strong desire to change, but just can’t take the first step: setting goals. What I recommend is: investigate the cause behind your impulse to postpone work until the last minute. To help you in it, there are management tools with automatic timesheet, showing to responsible how long a task already took, how long on average it takes, and what’s its delivery date. Thus, any professional can compare, on their own, the status of his work with the goals set – what may be a springboard for his self-esteem.
3. Better self-esteem
We tend to postpone commitments and avoid challenges, even the ones that contribute to make a dream real, because of low self-esteem. However, keeping postponing only makes us feel even smaller and we can move from doubt to certainty that we are unable. But the stress and anxiety of doing something at the last minute, or not doing until someone forget to ask for it, are not worth as much as the feeling of accomplishment. Even if you perform well under pressure and feel pleasure in taking risks, when it’s about a work others rely on, it’s not prudent to treat it like an adventure. So ask yourself: “Why I can’t just do it now?” To make sure you can, make your to-do list of the day with priority order and estimated time to complete each one. But none of that should be done by hand, to avoid distractions, but with an automated timesheet.
4. Reputation and career safe
The way you relate to the team directly affects the quantity and quality of your outcomes. So, your colleagues can end up giving up trust you, for fear of your reputation as a procrastinator. Even if you are a great professional, your habitual delays may make you miss the chance to take a higher role or get a raise. However, when the team works with an automatic timesheet integrated to a project management software, managers and leaders have access to key data in order to make smart decisions. In other words, before holding a professional credibility in check, they can track the progress of projects and talk with the responsible to understand what’s happening and what alternatives are possible.
5. New opportunities
Have you ever counted how many opportunities you missed for believing that was not the right time yet? The worst is that you may be used to lose them. Every opportunity could have been a turning point in your career and now you need luck to find a new one. It turns out that your business can’t depend on your luck and need a more mature professional right now. If you are a team leader, you know what having an impact team means. However you may not know yet that, by allowing everyone to work with an automatic timesheet of a task management software, priorities will become clearer and communication between responsible, faster. In short, more productive employees, which not only meet deadlines but are more engaged in work environment too and also ready to handle new responsibilities – improving the company’s profitability.
Automatic timesheet + task time and performance management software? Welcome to Runrun.it, the system adopted in more than 100 countries by more than 100,000 companies. Try it for free: http://runrun.it
