In my recent mid-year review, I noticed I have an entire list of tasks I've been procrastinating and moving from month to month. Some of them I've been putting off for years! Instead of just moving them forward again, I decided to dig a little deeper and figure out why I've been procrastinating them.
I wrote up a new list, and next to each task I wrote why I've been putting it off. This was eye-opening and forced myself to be honest. Some tasks carry a lot of emotional weight that I don't want to confront. Some tasks require technological skills or information that I don't have. Some of these cost money I don't really want to spend, or are multi-step time consuming projects I never seem to find the time for. The longest-procrastinated tasks combine several of these aspects. (Example: to transfer photos from a 20 year old external hard drive (where they were saved from a Windows desktop) to my iCloud via my macbook, which filled up my macbook's hard drive as it sees them as files not Photos, etc etc.)
Once I had figured out why I'd procrastinated each task, I started to write some solutions. Who to ask for more information, how to psyche myself up to actually do the things, when I can schedule time to do some of these things.
This exercise was very enlightening, and if nothing else now I know why I've been putting off these particular actions!
Do you tend to procrastinate intimidating tasks? What helps you confront them?
And as always on Fridays feel free to ask and/ or discuss anything ring organiser related!
Have a great weekend everyone!
Re: "Do you tend to procrastinate intimidating tasks?"
ReplyDeleteI'll think about that tomorrow.
Hans
Lol!
DeleteLaurie, Thank you for bringing this to the forefront. I recently received a diagnosis that is exacerbating my taxed ADHD brain and body. I now need to remove the “Hope” of completing this task/project to “Realistically” seeing myself doing the steps to completing this task/project. If not, I’ve begun doing brain dumps and archiving what I can no longer complete. -Jes
ReplyDeleteof Pittsburgh
Sorry to hear about your diagnosis Jes. <3
DeleteIf you have an iCloud account and you have it turned on for photos and the Mac is set to optimise the storage.
ReplyDeleteConnect your external drive and then import the photos from the drive in to Apple Photos.
It will then sync them all to your iCloud account but it will not fill up your hard drive. It reduces the resolution of the photos on the hard drive to fit the space available. But if you need the full res version it will download it to your Mac.
Need more information.... you know where to find me!
Thanks for this Steve. I haven't done this in awhile, but I seem to remember there was a formatting issue. Because the photos were saved as Windows Files, they weren't compatible/ recognised as photos by iPhotos and I had to reformat, which took ages. I'll have a look again.
DeleteThis is really smart. I need to do the same for some of my to do items that never get done. Although I recently had a couple of long procrastinated work tasks resolve themselves, so I got to mark them off my list without actually doing anything!
ReplyDelete