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.
A New Technique for Foregetful Procrastinators...Routine Clusters
Hi, I hope this helps somebody. It helps me. I am a forgetful procrastinator who wakes up in the morning absolutely overwhelmed by life. I can walk past an emergency and be oblivious to it for weeks, but in odd moments, remember and forget it again. So, that is why it has been so helpful to me lately to cluster routines as a memory prompter. Example:
FIRST CLUSTER: Every morning, it is a given that I WILL definitely get out of bed if I wake up alive. I cluster three small projects with that. I make my bed before I leave the room. I choose my clothing. I take any laundry out of the room and put it down the chute.
SECOND CLUSTER; Every morning, it is a given that I DEFINITELY WILL make a pot of coffee, come heckorhiwater. I cluster these these three things around that point: Feeding the howling cats, start the laundry, and catch up anything amiss in the kitchen.
RESULT: Every time I get up, I am conditioned to remember just three simple items: making the bed, finding an outfit and throwing dirty clothes down the chute.
RESULT: Every time I make coffee, I am conditioned to process laundry, tidy the kitchen and process laundry.
CONCLUSION: As forgetful as I am and as overwhelmed as I am, it is possible for me to remember these things when linked by this habitual conditioning of my memory. Just these two little 'cluster routines' have helped my world improve quite a bit and I am encouraged. I am going to try to devise more of these little habits linked to my daily rythyms. (How on earth do you spell 'rythms?'
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Routine Clusters
LOL, I think you got it with 'rythms'.
I use 'clusters' as well, although I've never called them that. I start off with one thing that is a given, or that is a regular habit, and I peg something else onto it. Once that becomes habit, I peg another thing on. My morning routine has 11 things upstairs and 11 things downstairs, and that seems to be about my limit. Remember, I didn't do 22 things all at once - I started off with just one! This is why it's taken me a couple of years to get to the point where I am now. And I can definitely vouch for this system Mrs Bell - it has made a huge difference in my life. I regularly do things I used to procrastinate about all the time - in fact, I regularly do things I could never even contemplate before.
Normy