We all have things to do that take more time than we prefer to spend doing them. When left undone, we pay a price. Other time-intensive activities are unimportant in the sense that nothing serious results if you don't do them. Both are time hog activities.
Time-hogs are what the name implies. These are excessively time-consuming activities. Some are necessary, such a filling out forms and going through red tape to get a license through a bureaucracy, or researching content for a presentation.
Some time hogs are discretionary but useful. You have a presentation deadline closing in on you. It's a nice idea to have a few original graphics to liven up the program. Unfortunately, you lack drawing skills. A computer-drawing program is appealing, and you could create great graphics if you knew how. Learning the program will gobble too much time from preparing for the presentation. If you take the time to learn the program and let your other preparation slide, you have your priorities backward. Learning to use the drawing program is a time hog project for when you have the time.
When you procrastinate, you'll substitute something less timely or irrelevant for what's pressing. For example, you tell yourself there is a gem of an idea somewhere that is necessary for you to know for your presentation. You randomly read to find it. You end up frittering time, gaining little, and falling behind on what is truly pressing to do. The procrastination diversion is the time hog.
Time hogs come in different forms, and your awareness of them is a step in the direction of getting better organized by eliminating them so you can make better use of you time. Here are four sample time hog practices:
1. You'd like to build a stonewall, repair your car, and replace your old windows with a new, energy efficient kind. You like the thought of mastering these self-help projects. Depending on your timing, climbing the learning curve to reach a high enough skill level may require more time and effort than you now have to expend. However, if you really want to learn these skills, carve out discretionary time to learn, practice, and hone the skills. As an alternative, delegate to someone with the skills.
2. Over-organization can gobble significant blocks of time and yield little in return. Focus on having total control and you can quickly sidetrack yourself. For example, you believe you must take care of every detail. With this cross every "t" and dot every "i" outlook, you arbitrarily blend important activities with trivial ones. You feel busy, pressured, spread thin, and in a time bind. This state of mind is distracting and it takes more time to get things done
3. Shopping is a time hog practice when you go to the Mall for a few items and then spread out to different shops like branches on a tree. A fifteen-minute trip extends into hours. You return home with more than you planned or needed to buy. Although this may not be a compulsive shopper habit, it can still be a time hog. Routinely branch out in this way, and you may feel time pressures to finish what you delay.
4. Social causes can be time hogs. You expend time and effort to support your political party's candidate or volunteer for charitable work. Emphasize this path, and you may misdirect youself from your own priorities. Regain a balance by allocating time for both without stretching beyond your reach.
Launch a self-analysis. Gain insight into what you gain by time hog activities. Ask yourself, what purposes does a time hog activity serve? Accept only verifiable answers. Then use the analysis to change the pattern.
The Cross-Out Sheet
The cross-out sheet method is for organizing your time and activities. You also can use it as an awareness technique and separate needless time hog practices from timely and relevant priorities.
Use the cross-out sheet method to create a to do list. Use the list to schedule your daily activities. Start by sequencing your priority activities either in their order of importance or in the order that you'll logically do them. When you complete an item, cross it off. Then you move on to the next. Include break times. As you cross out completed items, you may feel an emotional reward for accomplishment.
Use the cross-out sheet exercise to separate essential priorities from discretionary activities, and both from needless time hog diversions. As you list the tasks, be mindful of what you really don't need to do, what might be nice to do, and what is timely and important. Mark the essential activities with a capital E, the discretionary with a capital D, and distracting time hogs with a capital T. Then, eliminate needless time hogs from the list. Put discretionary items last.
The cross-out list is a versatile technique. Use it to
1. list the items in their order of priority;
2. alternate items you are likely to put off with more pleasant priority activities;
3. keep a separate list for weekly projects or one consisting of items representing your long-term goals;
4. isolate procrastination hotspots.
To identify procrastination hotspots, transfer items that you didn't finish to the next day's cross-out sheet. Put them in red ink. If the same items keep coming up, and they are priority items, they are potential procrastination hotspots.
Once you've isolated procrastination hotspots, here are two questions to answer that can help identify a problem. Your answer also can feed into an analysis of what is happening. What's the purpose of delaying from day to day? Am I substituting discretionary time hog activities for necessary routine and priority activities? Then act on verifiable answers. You are likely to drop many time hogs by doing this exercise.
Your analysis may demonstrate that you tend to overschedule yourself. You are doing what is more important first. If so, shorten your list to accommodate to the time you have available to do work activities. Accept that you are following the do it now philosophy of doing reasonable things in a reasonable way within a reasonable time.
For information on using time productively that you'd ordinarily use procrastinating, go to
End Procrastination Now! for guidance.
Tune into my free Podcast procrastination workshop at: www.smartrecovery.libsyn.org.
For information on How to Get and Stay Organized: Part 1 go to: https://my.psychologytoday.com/blog/science-and-sensibility/201112/how-get-and-stay-organized-part-1
Dr. Bill Knaus
