Today I spent meaningful time reading many intriguing and enlightening articles online.
The first article I would like to share is one which talks about this term “precrastination”. We are all familiar with “procrastination” whereby we delay doing things that need to be done. Precrastination is the state whereby we get tasks done as quickly as possible, even at the expense of extra effort.
The title of the article “Precrastination – The Danger of Finishing Tasks Too Early” puzzled me as I can’t see why getting things done quickly would be a bad thing since we have always talked about the disadvantage of procrastination. Since procrastination is bad, surely precrastination must be a good thing? In this technological era, aren’t we always multi-tasking and looking at getting as many things completed in the shortest time possible?
The article explains that rushing to check things off the to-do list as quickly as possible would leave us with no time to think things through. In the rush, mistakes might be made and we might need to redo tasks.
The key might be that we should improve effectiveness – getting the right things done with the best utilization of resources, instead of just increasing the quantity of things done using less time.
Pre-crastinators are driven to complete smaller, more trivial tasks to get things out of the way before starting the important tasks. They might have a strong desire to cross things out their mental to-do lists even at the expense of extra effort.
We should be getting the right things done at the correct time to get the best results. One useful method shared by the article is that we can categorise our tasks as “urgent and important”, “important but not urgent”, “urgent but not important” or “neither important nor urgent”. We should focus on the most important tasks first to be the most productive.
I believe this applies both to work as well as life. In life, if we spent majority of our time completing those “urgent but not important” or “neither important nor urgent” stuff, we might never get the time to focus on those “important but not urgent” stuff that could make a difference in our lives.
What are the “important but not urgent” stuff which we tend to overlook and push aside while we deal with the “urgent and important” stuff like a deadline at work or in school? It is spending time with people you care about, taking time to rest and sleep, exercising, eating healthy food, finding time for recreation etc etc. In short, all those things which constitute a beautiful life.
