Welcome September!

byTinaPiety

94 followers

6 years ago

It’s September!

Back to school and cooler weather. I love September. To me it is a time for new starts and beginnings. I was always excited to go back to school when a kid and still feel that excitement many years beyond that time.

One thing September means to me is action. It’s a time to be active; active at school while a kid and active at work now that I’m older.

To be successful, we must take action. Seems simple, right? Then why sometimes do we find it so hard to do? It can be because the task is boring, difficult, or something we just don't want to do. Other times we can feel overwhelmed by how much work must be done to compete the task and don’t know where to start.

How do we overcome this? How do we get through something that is boring or so overwhelming we don’t know where to start? Denial won't cause the task to go away. Procrastination won’t make it any easier; in fact, it will make it harder. So what do we do?

Here are a few ideas that can help:

• Retrain your thoughts. Look at your thinking. If your mind is full of negative thoughts, you will start to believe that the task is impossible and that it's okay to give up, put it off, or leave it unfinished. Instead of thinking, “I can't do this,” tell yourself, “I will get this done now.”
• Decide what your most important task is and do it first. Prioritize and organize. Organize your tasks into ones that are important and must be done soon; need to be done but can wait; and can wait till I get around to it.
• Get to know when your peak performance time is. Regardless of how you feel about the task, choose that time to do it especially if it's important.
• Be careful about distractions. Don’t get caught up answering emails or on social media. Schedule specific time and time limits for these undertakings.
• Learn to make decisions decisively. You can train yourself to do this by setting a stopwatch. Give yourself one minute to decide and then move on. If you spend too long deciding, you might not decide at all.
  

  
• Schedule a block of time to work on the task. Choose a time block that works for you; it could be 40 minutes, 50 minutes, or more. Work as intensely as you can, then take a break and work on something else for a while and come back to it.
• When a task feels overwhelming, identify what you can reasonably accomplish in a certain period and make that your goal. Then, break it down into steps so that you won’t be overwhelmed in the process of completing it.
• Consider the time you when you're shopping, driving, or standing in lines. Do you fill that time with worrying or negative thoughts? Instead, train your mind to be thinking about how you can accomplish your tasks. Take a notebook with you and write down any ideas you have. This is a very popular technique because frequently people have great ideas but can't remember them by the time they get to a place where they can write them down.
• Are you overextending yourself? Learn to say no. Many times, it's hard to say no either because we don't want to let somebody down or because we're afraid to turn jobs away. But the truth is that if we overextend ourselves, we might not finish any of our jobs or we might finish them late.
• Give yourself a bribe. No matter how hard we work on our mindset, there will always be some tasks we just don't like. There's nothing wrong with a bribe for completing the things we don't like to do.
• Reward yourself! Give yourself something you want to encourage you to complete the task. Consider small awards for each aspect of a larger task, with a large award at the end.

Taking action can be hard. There are so many things that compete for our time and we can feel overwhelmed, which can lead to procrastination. If you are like me and feel September is a time of beginnings, take advantage of that feeling to act. And don't forget to treat yourself when you are done!