31 Days of Finishing – Day 10: Procrastinate by Doing an Equally Important To-do

Day 10:  I skipped car seat cover shopping and cleaned the refrigerator instead. For today that is NOT a bad trade off.

Today’s to-do was pretty straightforward: Buy bucket car seat covers and install.  I had already checked Amazon and found nothing I wanted to buy so this meant I had to go to the store and look around. But before I put on the car seat-covers, I really wanted to vacuum and shampoo the car seats. But that wasn’t working out as simply as I wanted. So I was at a stalemate.

I procrastinated another day. But I still had 31 minutes at my disposal.  So I did something else, something equally important. I cleaned out my fridge.

Moral of the story? Sometimes you just CAN’T get yourself it complete the main to-do on your list. Nothing drastic will happen if you don’t complete it today:

• no late fees,
• no cut off services,
• no lost chance to make a cool million.

So it is easy to put this off. To get back my motivation, I sometimes trick myself.  I do something else equally important. Then tomorrow I do the original to-do. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t.

I will see tomorrow whether it worked or not.

During this month of October I am joining LOTS of bloggers hosted by The Nester who will be writing every day about a topic. My topic is about finishing. I will spend 31 minutes each day on a to-do item (from the secondary list).

I will write about it and share any productivity tips I find helpful to FINISHING things.

Go here for the Landing Page with all the posts (which go live as they are written). The list is towards the bottom of the page. Go to the following highlighted link for Day 11: Do the FUN thing When It’s Super Hectic.

Your Turn . . .

• Do you ever do this kind of “creative” procrastination? If yes, what was the last trade-off you made?
• How did you spend your 31 minutes?
• What was the last thing you crossed off your secondary to-do list? How did you “convince” yourself to get it done?

Related Posts . . . 

• 3 Whiteboard Cleaning Tips 
• 5 Things I Can Do When I Don’t Want to Work
• Cleaning Your Ceiling Fan in 5 Easy Steps
• How Messy Is Too Messy or When Is It Clean Enough To Have Folks Over?