5 Steps To Banishing Procrastination

Remember the Bill Murray movie, What About Bob? The main character is so riddled with emotional problems that he’s told to take baby steps towards any goal.  The movie was fun, but those baby steps have served me well in real life.  I’m saying that every lawyer is riddled with psychological issues, but biting off too much at once can make anyone choke.

Rather than staring down a huge looming project with a single deadline, chop is up into little interim deadliness as a way of staying on course and avoiding procrastination.  Rather than worrying about an appellate brief, think about a smaller deadline for simply outlining the point’s you’ll need to make.  Then another small deadline for researching each one of those points.  And on and on.  Baby steps.

Bolster Confidence

A well-understood job is preferred over one that is vague. A certain amount of challenge and certainty in the outcome makes us pick a task and work towards its completion. Overwhelming tasks are a bugaboo and lead to procrastination.  Rather than running from a vague task, spend some time researching it and making it more concrete.  Doing so makes it feel more familiar and less daunting.

Realize That Good Enough Is Good Enough

Perfectionists conduct unending research and data gathering in order to get it right. I’ve yet to meet a lawyer who wasn’t a perfectionist to some extent, but there’s a limit.  Too much of what my wife calls, “Ed Norton Syndrome,” amounts to nothing more than procrastination.  You’re free to fine-tune a process, but not until you’ve begun doing it.  Don’t worry about that pleading you’re working on – until you’ve done a first draft.  Get it out there, and hone as a second step.

Make It Fun

Lawyer work is not fun work.  At least, most of the time it isn’t.  Boring work makes us inefficient, stressed out, and likely to seek distractions (Facebook anyone?). Procrastination is often nothing more than relief from boredom.  Give yourself little milestones and rewards to work with to liven it up.  You may not always succeed, but at least try.

Kill Off The Distractions

We all suffer from a little bit of ADHD.  No solo lawyer – indeed, no business owner – can escape it.  Not only do we have too many things to do and not enough time to get it all done, we’re constantly interrupted by phone calls, email, tweets, and notifications from a variety of sources.  It’s no wonder we can’t get anything done.

So next time you’ve got work to get done, unplug the phone.  Don’t lower the ringer, pull the thing out of the wall.  Shut off the cell phone.  Close out of Outlook.  Shut down Firefox.  Grab a set of noise-canceling headphones and put them on – without music.

Now it’s your turn.  How do you combat procrastination?

Image credit:   Some rights reserved by Thomas Hawk