Leo Babauta has brought out another little gem of a book called Un-Procrastination.  As the name suggest it’s all about overcoming procrastination.

I would like to do more product reviews which I think will benefit you.  Some of the reviews will have affiliate links and some wont, but all of them will be products that I think will benefit you a lot.

Back to Leo’s Book Un-Procrastination.  I read it last night, and At 65 pages the guide packs in a lot.  Here is the table of contents:

The Table of Contents

There are 18 brief chapters:

1. My Procrastination Story
2. Why Procrastination Hurts Us
3. When Procrastination is Good
4. Why We Procrastinate
5. A Simple Method
6. Fine-tune Your Motivation
7. Choosing Important Tasks
8. Find Your Best Time
9. Create a Distraction-free Workspace
10. Single-tasking
11. The Art of the Small
12. Fear & Procrastination
13. Reduce Friction to Get to Done
14. Kill Choice
15. More Procrastination Remedies
16. Engineer Habit Change
17. Procrastination Questions, Answered

I do a hell of a lot of online work and can sometimes find little, unimportant jobs that are not really on my list of priorities, which keep me form working on what’s important.  Reading the book last night, gave me an insight as to why I do this.  It was one of those moments when you just say ‘Oh! That’s the reason’, it has already helped me to move forward on the work I am doing just now for my next project.

Leo’s book is only $11.95 so is well worth the price tag, I am not getting an affiliate commission if you buy it, I just think it’s an issue a lot of us struggle with and Leo brought out a great little book to help you with it.

Click on Un-Proacrastination by Leo Babauta to buy this ebook.

The magazine is in PDF format but looks like a professional magazine and it’s obvious that Michael and his team has put in a lot of time and effort into producing this.  It’s not your normal PDF download.

As I said there are 17 articles on productivity and how you can get more done in your life and the list of blog authors is impressive.

• Alex Shalman Blog
• Black Belt Productivity
• Change your thoughts
• Cranking Widgets
• David Allen Company
• GTD Times
• LifeClever
• Marc and Angel Hack a Life
• Michael Sliwinski on Productivity
• Organize IT
• Positive Sharing
• Productivity 501
• Productivity in Context
• Put Things off
• Simply Get Things Done with Nozbe
• The Happiness Project
• Unclutterer
• Zen Habits

You can head over just now and check it out by clicking this link Productive Magazine by Michael Sliwinski

When I had to wash the dishes I done it haphazardly, wash a knife here, wash a dish there and consequently it took me ages to do them and they weren’t done properly.  I was then shown a way to do them which seemed to make the chore less of a chore and I would zip through doing the dishes.  Now I have shown my children how to do the dishes properly they see it as less of a chore as well (no we don’t have a dishwasher thank goodness).  My son said he done his homework the same way  I showed him how to do the dishes, when I asked him to explain I thought the intelligence required to link dishes with doing homework was amazing and I told him so.  Having expanded on it a little more you could apply washing dishes system to anything in life.

How to wash dishes

Pre-preparation

About 10 minutes after dinner, in my house, you’ll always hear me shouting through ‘who’s not rinsed their plate off?’ and one of the boys will come trundling through and rinsing their dinner plate off under the tap.  Rinsing the plate will obviously make washing the dishes a lot easier, especially if they sit for half an hour before they are washed and dried.

So it is with any chore or task, pre-preparation is a good habit to get into.  Imagine you’ve been given a report to write for next week, you have a thousand other things to do so can’t do it right away.  What you can do right away is a little pre-preparation.  You quickly skim the task and find out what it is about and in your mind what you will have to do to prepare it, you write this down and put it in with the folder for the next time you pick it up.  What this does is sets unconscious triggers in your mind and your mind starts to work on the report without you doing anything.  It keeps it fresh in your mind and when you sit down to do the report a lot of the work has already been done, without you even knowing it all because you’ve done a little pre-preparation.

Preparation

So the dishes have been rinsed half an hour before they are due to be washed.  The next stage is preparation.  This involves making sure all the cups are emptied before washing, any bowls have been rinsed, the sink is cleaned before washing , all the dishes are grouped together and the right amount of hot water and washing up liquid is put in before starting.

This preparation is applied to any task.  It is a vital component of reducing any stress when starting a task.  You get everything ready before starting any task.  I work as a homeless tenancy support worker and I see about 30 clients week who are at various stages of homelessness.  My week is prioritised and I see the ones who need a lot of work done on a Monday and Tuesday and I prepare any paperwork that they might need done or any information they might need before going to see them.  This could involve filling out a benefits form, getting more information on an education course, or helping them with an application for funding for furniture.  Then I group the clients together in order of area as I have to cover an area of possibly 100 square miles in a week, grouping them makes it quicker and easier to get through all the work required. Every single task in the world requires preparation, if no preparation is done then time, money and energy is wasted which causes undue stress.  I always leave about 90 minutes per day in case of emergencies and for writing notes.

The task

Now it’s time for the dishes to be washed.  These are done in groups; cutlery first, plates, cups, glasses and then pots and pans.  Grouping makes them easier to stack and quicker to get through.  Each dish is washed and then rinsed to make sure there is no dirt, if there’s still a little dirt it is then washed and rinsed again.  To make the task a little less of a chore I remember playing games in my head when washing dishes.  I used to play cutlery Olympics whereby all the cutlery was  put in the sink and I wanted to see if the knifes, forks or spoons would win the gold medal i.e. what one would finish being washed first, there were four possible winners as the spoons had teaspoons in them as well. I always willed for the underdog and hoped the teaspoons would win, I don’t know why but the teaspoons always used to come last and the knifes or forks used to win.

When writing articles I use the same method as above.  I group my writing tasks on subject.  So if I have 5 articles to write and two of them are on self help, two on property, and one on making money online, I group the and write them in order of groups.  I also find photos to go with each.  To make the task more interesting I try and finish as quickly as I can without compromising on quality.  I then re-read the articles and make sure they are okay and feel okay to publish.  This often involves, in fact, always, involve a little re-writing.  I then publish them to various blogs, or compile an ebook or send out to a newsletter group.

Post task

The dishes have now all been washed and rinsed and stacked on the rack.  It’s time for a cleanup.  This involves cleaning any water and soap bubbles off the sink area, cleaning the sink out and rinsing out the sink.  Voila dishes are done in record time and the forks have won the gold medal again.

Going back to writing articles, after I have completed checked, and published  them I always save the files to somewhere I can find them quickly and easily.  I also answer any queries via email on the various articles or any blog responses, although I have become a bit lax with this lately.  I then sit back and chill out knowing I have done a good job and done it to the best of my ability.

Now, go and get the dishes done!

If you don’t take action, you will regret it, whatever it is you need to take action for. You are someone who is filled with the get up and go to change your life in so many fantastic ways if only you would get up and do something about it.

Here are 8 ways you can get up and take action:

Wipe the slate clean – If you have too many projects on the go, clear them all and start from scratch. When you have wiped the slate clean, concentrate on thing at a time until it’s finished and then move onto the next. If you can’t clear everything, just drop them temporarily, concentrate on one thing until it’s finished and then move on. You will find you move a lot quicker through everything you need to get done.

List everything – Make a list of everything you would like to do, whether it be cleaning the house to taking the dog a walk. Write it down.

Prioritise – Pick the most important thing you have to do for the day, or week or year, and then pick the next most important thing and so on until you have reached the bottom off your list.

Eliminate distraction – No I don’t mean kill your partner! Eliminate the things you do from day to day that distracts you from taking action for example TV, books, computer. When you eliminate distractions, your mind wants something to do and this makes you more inclined to take action on the things you want or need to do.

Take a day off – Maybe a bit contradictory this one. It’s a simple piece of advice but one that is hard to do. Just take a whole day off, the world will still turn, the work will get done and nobody will die because you are not there. You will come back refreshed and ready to take action again which means you will be a lot more productive than you would have been should you have kept going.

Clear the clutter – Clearing the clutter, whether it be from your desk, your house, or your wardrobe. When there is clutter in your life there is clutter in your mind, clearing the clutters clears your mind.

Analysis paralysis – This is the term given to people who are analysing things too much and it keeps them from moving on. Stop analysing and just do it. There comes a time when you have to stop evaluating something and just bite the bullet and do it, if it doesn’t work out do something else and start again.

Change the narrator of your thoughts – Do your thoughts predominantly sound like Elmer Fud on dope; ‘Yeah, I have to get up but I can’t be arsed, I’ll do it tomorrow’. Change Elmer Fud to someone who gets you going, someone who can motivate you into doing something. It can be anybody from your best mate to your wife or a film star, anybody as long as they can motivate you. This can be quite amusing and the results can be great.