The student syndrome is alive. It is all around me and I feel no less guilty.
Why do we put off everything until the last minute? Even the most important things.
I recently read The 4-Hour Workweek of Timothy Ferriss. It has helped me to be more sensitive to the phenomenon that is happening all around me.
Timothy, and I agree with him in the book, explains how many people fill their lives with “busy work” which takes effort and activity but provides little value. This is partly why people put off the things that add real value. These are often the most difficult tasks. This is why they are delayed. It’s like subconsciously burying our heads in the sands of minutiae and busy work.
I am refocusing my efforts on increasing productivity. It has helped me to become more organized. Ferriss’s new insight has helped me see the benefits of elimination. This means removing all the unnecessary work. Instead, I will focus on 20% of the activities that can deliver 80% of my potential value.
This is true for my writing and project work. If I look at 50 deliverables, I can see that only 10 of them add 80% to the project’s value. The top 10 deliverables should be my priority and the rest can be left for later. It is likely that a lower-value item of 10 or less value doesn’t get completed. (Note: There is no correlation between the deliverable’s value and the actual cost of completion. Interesting….)
Timothy, thank you for showing us that project management can be applied to almost all things.
