The Hard Way or the Easy Way

If we accept that in life and work, we have to do things, start and finish projects and just get things out of the way in order to move on, earn our living, learn and develop and just navigate a good life, then figuring out the easy way of getting things done could be a great relief not to mention a competitive advantage!

Here are three possibilities that open up the easy way of getting things done.

Don’t assume you’re Procrastinating

Procrastinating has a terrible reputation.

It’s assumed to be a bad thing. Our inner critic likes to throw it around as a casual insult anytime we’re behind on a to do list.

Perhaps it’s time to question the negative assumption.

If you tend to delay or put off tasks, don’t assume it’s procrastinating and don’t assume it’s a negative.

Time is a valuable resource and what one person sees as needless delay can be another’s clever time management. Using the available time to schedule and sequence tasks and using all the time right to the deadline isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Key to using time wisely is knowing your most effective work patterns. Do you mull things over, do you draft and redraft, revisit and gradually refine a piece of work?

Do you break a task into separate deliverables and only put it all together at the end?

Do you plan it all out before you start the actual execution?

Do you need the pressure of a deadline to think at your sharpest or quickest?

The “solutions” to procrastinating tend to centre around early and quick task completion. If that’s a useful style for you, then great. But it’s not a pattern that works for everyone, so find and embrace your most effective and natural patterns and you’ll never accuse yourself of procrastinating again.

Perfection

Perfection is overrated and, in most cases, completely unnecessary.

If you have a tendency toward this, you may find the final 10% of any task disproportionately difficult and time consuming.

As an experiment, omit the final 10% on a task and see how it goes.

How was the 90% task received compared with your last output?

Use that feedback to refine your approach to the next piece of work. Maybe you can omit the last 15% next time or reduce your tolerance to the last 5%?

That way you can calculate the acceptable minimum standard for each task output.

If you are meeting that acceptable standard in less than perfect execution, suddenly you have a choice. You can take that last 10% of time and effort and decide what to do with it. If objectively, the task doesn’t require it, you can call it complete at 90% or you can continue with the last 10%.

But you do so in the knowledge that the task doesn’t require it.

Either way, you have the wherewithal to introduce some ease into your task completion pattern.

Match the Work to your Energy and Enthusiasm Level

It’s important in finding ease that we know the tasks that match our energy and enthusiasm levels. If we don’t do this exploration, we produce dissonance in our work and never know why.

Dissonance happens when we attempt a high energy task when we’re low on energy and the thing takes forever to do. The next time you discern a dissonance, take the time to explore it.

Is it an energy mismatch or a lack of interest or engagement? What might help ease the mismatch?

Try to know what your task, energy, enthusiasm matches are and you can get your work patterns to harmonise with your resources of energy and engagement.