I have found myself extremely behind at various times during my life but generally it wasn’t the end of the world. Sometimes I would say to myself, I work better under pressure! Of course, this was bullshit, but I am a  master at rationalization. As we used to say when I was in psychology grad school… The defence mechanisms are strong in this one. (If you missed the allusion, think of the line from Star Wars, “The Force is strong… et cetera.)

But when you have 85 items left on your To Do List of 110 original items and you have only 25 days until your wedding, your tendency towards procrastination and working under pressure is a bit of a problem. So today, I re-dedicated myself to getting things done. In order to motivate myself and get a few ideas on how best to proceed I read some selected parts of Leo Babauta’s e-Book Focus that I downloaded on my Kindle I just got for my birthday. (I love the Kindle, by the way, because it travels easily and I can have multiple books with me when I have minutes or hours open during the day… thanks Kate.)

One of the best ideas that Leo has in Focus is to stop procrastinating by selecting one thing you need or want to do that you are excited about and commit to doing just five minutes. Almost anyone can commit to five minutes, right? The thing is, once the five minutes is over, generally you have made some good progress or at least set up a starting place and you really want to keep going. Thus, you generally do more, or, you set yourself up to come back to your now started project for another five minutes and then another.

Again, this is not rocket science, but just starting is what seems so hard to do at times, and once started a project is less daunting than one that is languishing on the To Do List.

By the way, by using this method today I:

• Updated the wedding website with details and directions and maps.
• Contacted servers to work at the reception through CraigsList.
• Found a wholesale flower seller that I will be visiting tomorrow.

In other words, the list remains long, but at least three unstarted projects are now moving. So, if you are stuck on a project commit to doing just five minutes and see what happens.