Eleventh commandment: “Do not postpone”

Today I received a call from the library and asked to return the book. I was not surprised, because I remembered that the deadline had recently expired and wanted to go to hand over the book to the library. What was my surprise when I learned that I owed a book more than a year!



Of course, everything is obvious: I was deceiving myself by constantly postponing for tomorrow so often that the thought “it would be necessary to return the book” came out in the natural order of the day. Then I wondered: how many things I put off and how does it threaten?
')
And that's what I discovered:

First of all, it is important to understand how it is harmful to postpone even the most insignificant things to “later”. I will cite as an example the parable:


In short: the longer the problem hangs "in the background", the more discomfort it causes. And in fact, surely everyone had moments when everything was annoying. When trifles after trifles, all together falls out and spoils our mood. Every single detail is harmless, but all together they cause irritation and even anger.

Who seeks will always find

After the call, I decided to look for a “couple” of even the most insignificant problems that I postpone for later. And I discovered the first problem instantly: there is not a single pen or pencil near my workplace. This is the first problem I encountered. Only when I found the pen, I wrote down a few problems that hung day after day, but I didn’t do anything with them:

• Near the workplace there is no handle.
• Near the workplace there is no garbage can.
• When I run windows, I open some unnecessary programs for me.
• Java update. I start a session at the computer with this window turned off.
• My desktop has not yet been cleaned, no launch shortcuts have been created, and I'm looking for programs through a search.
• The book treacherously continued to lie on the shelf.
• I did not clean the drawer.

And there were countless such problems. Each of them meant nothing to me: well, I’ll close the window when I start, well, I’ll go to another room to throw out the garbage. But everything turns life into an annoying deception: tomorrow (then, in the evening) I will do everything!

Solution to the problem

Naturally, all problems cannot be solved in one fell swoop. Get out, clean the table, fix the door, all things can not be done in one sitting. But if you do not make them now, where is the guarantee that I will not postpone them for a long “later”? It was impossible to allow the mood for a big cleaning to disappear. So I immediately took a piece of paper and began to write down everything, even the smallest, trivialities.

I recommend writing down promises, goals, making notes on real paper. This is completely different from writing to any Google Docs or Evernote. It is much easier to press the "delete" button than to burn or throw away the book. Try to write everything down on paper. According to Robert Cialdini (author of the book “The Psychology of Influence”), when a person writes down his thoughts, he subconsciously undertakes to fulfill them. He tries to be consistent, to do what he expects from himself. This is a very important step for our brain: writing down information, we become responsible for it. Try to always write notes on paper.

Having received an impressive list, I immediately identified the problems that are corrected in a matter of seconds. I removed from the startup unlocker, utorrent. I introduced exclusion programs into punto-switcher (it pissed me off when in sublime text 2 the layout changed while writing code). I prepared the briefcase and clothes the next day.

Even after these minor changes, "breathing has become easier." I feel that now it is much easier for me to perform routine, daily tasks. Now I solve more complex problems that also annoy me, but which I was not going to fix everything.

Improving performance is worth your time. Why should we spoil our mood, reduce the thoroughness of work due to small things that can be corrected, for example, in one day?

Not very long ago, here, on Habré, there was an article in which it was said that programmers returned to business for a very long time if they were distracted. Little things distract no worse than people. When you are annoyed you go to another room to throw out the garbage, to return to work is not so easy, it takes time, which we always have little. (By the way, the garbage on the table is not a solution to the problem, but to postpone it, do not be fooled)

Try to mark everything that at least ever annoyed you. What you do every day, although you can get rid of it much faster. Find such things, write them down and destroy them on the list, like a hired killer.

Report errors in the text in private messages. Quickly fix, thanks.
And yes - do not add this article to your favorites. Well, do not delay already, start right now!