Procrastinators Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from chronic procrastination.
Intro and an idea
Hi Everyone,
I'm Bodhi - a world class procrastinator ;-) I joined recently thinking I would benefit by doing the daily check-in that many of you do. As someone who works alone from home (theorectically ;) it is so valuable to have a way to externalize my process knowing others are there "listening" in some sense... I'm sure it can help to deal with the isolation of working from home. I've been hesitant to start this process though, I feel like I'm needing more than to post my to do list for the day.
However, I just had the inspiration to create a game - similar to an idea I've used before, but I see how much more powerful it could be if others were playing along with me. We're not playing "against" one another really, but against ourselves - and in the process spurring each other to greater and greater productivity.
My concept for this game is to assign a dollar value to different tasks that I need to do, and also to the tasks or things I do that waste time. The values would be on a scale from -$100 to $100 - perhaps you can guess that the tasks that I'm procrastinating about the most would be worth $100 (for up to 1 hours time). The worst, most undesirable time wasters would be at -$100 (for up to an hours time). Mundane tasks that honestly need to be done that I don't have issues with would be $1 - $10, something like that. The idea would be to "earn" as much as I can every day (and hopefully not lose money!). Of course, the values are all completely arbitrary - and if other people were playing along, our totals would not likely compare in any meaningful way. It's really that we're playing against ourselves - perhaps trying to beat our prior day's score. As well I'm thinking of having a goal of earning $100,000 or something like that. I don't know that I would sustain the motivation to do this on my own, but if others were playing too, that would make it fun for me and I think I would keep up with it.
Is anyone interested? Perhaps - if I don't procrastinate about it - I'll make up my list of tasks and corresponding values and simply post to the daily check-in thread - and then check in with my total "earnings" each day. That way if others are inspired they could simply join in.
In any case, thanks to you all for being here!
~Bodhi :D
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Additional thoughts about the "Productivity Bank" Game
I'm adding a few thoughts - mainly for my own benefit... so I can keep in mind exactly what I was intending to do in coming up with this idea. Mainly it's that I struggle with finding value in a lot of tasks that are essential, yet in any moment in time they seem unrelated to my goals or purpose. One can accumulate many such tasks simply by being a chronic procrastinator - there tends to be a backlog of things that need to be done. It's old stuff and not new (fun ad more interesting) stuff (and there's the guilt associated with these tasks because I procrastinated about them). Yet, some backlogged tasks simply need to get done, lest greater problems (and yet other unfun tasks and more guilt) result.
So that is part of my madness here - attempting to find a way to value things that my mind wants to dismiss as a waste of time (even though to another part of me, that's obviously not rational) - as well as to make the whole ordeal a bit "lighter" and perhaps even fun (ya never know!).
Another value in this game is that I'm attempting to place a $ value on all of my time, other than time I would normally be sleeping. I occasionally try to log all my time, but usually find it so depressing that I don't keep up with it. But it is of course an eye-opening exercise to honestly keep track of how you spend all your time. We'll see how this goes - I've created a spreadsheet where I'm assigning a $ value to my productivity - or lack thereof - for every 1/4 hour of the day. Then I can easily total my earnings for the day. If anyone is interested, I can probably share a copy of the spreadsheet, which also has tabs where I'm listing tasks (and time wasters) and giving them values. The time/earnings log could also be printed out to make handwritten notes, and then one could go back and total the time on the spreadsheet later.
Well that's all for now :)