Are You Being Sabotaged?

Imagine the perfect workday. You probably do that on your way to work, picturing everything you plan to accomplish during the day. During a perfect day, everything goes as planned, and time is mastered, not wasted.

Visualize it: When you walk into the office, everything is calm and orderly; everyone is in control and performing their jobs without confusion or disruption.

You go to your office ready to start your day and work through it with ease, completing your goals. Mission accomplished! Job well done!

Sounds good, but it rarely happens. Too many days end with us feeling as though our time has been sabotaged.

But has it?

Each one of those wild days begins with the best of intentions and an ambitious fantasy of what we will accomplish. So, what gets in the way? When work is left unfinished at the end of the day or if we don’t have time to pursue our goals, we become frustrated and dissatisfied.

It is essential to identify how we compromise time and find solutions that work. Perhaps unexpected circumstances continually need your attention, or certain people lean on you more than others. It could even be tangible aspects of the physical environment.

Let’s look at what can go wrong — the factors that often sabotage time.

Lack of Discipline

Ouch! This sounds like a criticism, but it’s not. We’re not talking about a lack of discipline in your life, but about lack of discipline in how you use your time. Even the most disciplined people sometimes fall into the trap of letting something or someone sabotage their time.

The key is to recognize this when it happens and determine why it’s happening. What culprit sabotaged your time? Once you find out, you can take action to keep history from repeating itself.

Procrastination

If you are a victim of your own procrastination, it’s costing you plenty. Procrastination results in poor planning and poor preparation. You react to circumstances and events and fall prey to crisis management. This compromises a quality result, and you fix what went wrong or duplicate efforts.

Procrastination results from bumping a task from your to-do list and putting it off. Sometimes a bump is necessary; it can be caused by a domino effect when someone else’s deadline prohibits you from accomplishing your objective. It can also be caused by a true emergency that takes priority.

It’s important to recognize the root of procrastination. It could be one or more of the following:

1. Ill-preparedness

2. A dreaded task

3. Uncertainty about how to approach a task; the objective is not clear

4. Not enough (or not the right) resources

5. No support from staff or leadership

6. Not committed

7. Low-priority task

8. Unrealistic expectations

9. Resisting change

When the cause of procrastination is clear, you can do something about it. Perhaps it is best to forget it all together, which requires discussion and a decision in collaboration with those affected by eliminating the action.

The best solution may be to turn the job over to someone else or to calendar it for a later day. Perhaps it is one of those many trivial matters rather than those vital few that are worth your time.

One thing is for sure: If you keep bumping a task, you must stop procrastinating and act. Rid yourself of the procrastination habit, and you will find new freedom to use your time in a way that makes sense.

Adapted from Take Back Time: Bringing Time Management to Medicine, by Judy Capko .