Juggling Sheep
Welcome to Juggling Sheep, Jay Perry's blog about time management and personal productivity for pastors. Learn to balance work, life, family, and personal spirituality.

Share your best practices, tips and tricks, processes, sermon planning ideas, and resources. Feel free to email me: jaylperry[at]gmail[dot]com.

Monday, January 15, 2007

Lifehacks - Set a Timer to Thwart Procrastination

Set a timer to trick yourself out of perfectionist procrastination.

If I thought of how much work it would be to clean my whole kitchen, I would never even get started (perfectionists are the best procrastinators).

So I set the kitchen timer for 5 minutes and see how much I can get done (before I go back to playing sudoku or surfing the web). If I only get 5 minutes of cleaning done, fine. But sometimes, when the timer goes off, I'll want to finish up what I've started ("I'm so close to being done!"). And I end up cleaning 10 or 15 minutes. And my wife is astounded at how clean the kitchen is when she gets home from work (hurrah!).

Setting a timer is the best way I know of to trick yourself into defeating procrastination. Are you so overwhelmed with the thought of writing the whole sermon that you can't even make yourself start? Set a timer for 10 minutes and see how much you can get outlined. Chances are that once you start, you won't be able to stop.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have used this trick and it works. Good advice.

This site looks promising to me. I will be monitoring it.