One day last week I found myself with an entire afternoon free. It was the perfect amount of time to plow through two major projects I had been putting off for months. I had a veritable ocean of time to get disciplined and focused.

Oh, but wait. A few things I needed to pick up before the lockdown popped up in my head. What happened next was highly predictable: I convinced myself that NOW was the time this road trip had to happen, so I bundled up and headed out. I had fun shopping but by the time I got back, my beautiful ocean of work time had evaporated down to a mere puddle.

Does this sound familiar? I keep hearing variations on this theme in my coaching practice so my guess is this feeling is quite pervasive. I have always used tricks, some crazy and some mundane, to get myself to do things I am inclined to avoid. I thought I would share some and if you have adopted some good ones yourself, I would love to hear about them and pass them along to others. For today, I have three:

1. Don’t finish the job

I know it sounds weird but if you have a job to do that you are really avoiding, you don't have to do it all at once. This one might be a little tough to adopt at first because most of us have our parents in our heads saying “If you start the job, finish it!” But I say no. A small for instance is if you are getting ready for bed and the kitchen is dirty, clean half of it tonight and half in the morning. I know it isn’t ideal but if looking at the mess makes you want to run screaming to the other side of the house, doing half of it before bed might not seem so bad. In the morning, you will have a much smaller task that won’t seem as intimidating as the entire kitchen appeared last night. The point is, you got the kitchen done rather than procrastinating. You just have to give yourself permission – only during the pandemic! – to get jobs done more slowly and in bite-sized pieces rather than always completing them in one fell swoop. This way, tasks might get done slower but at least they get done.

2. Practise calendar blocking

I didn’t know there was a name for this until recently! When I was being interviewed for a job 35 years ago, my potential bosses asked me how I keep track of my tasks. I told them I just keep it all up in my head. They were having nothing of it and they taught me to calendar block… in my Quo Vadis! Remember those??? Calendar blocking is easy:

1. Create a detailed to do list with projects and the tasks required to complete each project.
2. Put every task for every project somewhere in your calendar so that it has a date and a duration. Your calendar should be chockablock full even if your to do list isn’t huge.
3. Let your calendar tell you exactly what you are doing and when you are doing it each day.
4. If you don’t complete a task or have to skip it completely, move it to some open place in your calendar in the future. That way no task falls though the cracks. It gets done or it gets moved, only to come back and haunt you again.

3. Skip the line

I get distracted easily and often. There is always something more fun to do (binging Queen’s Gambit?). So when I want to do something fun, I will often ask myself “What task can I slip in front of this fun stuff so that the fun stuff becomes the reward for completing the task?” Since there are always lots of tasks to complete, I then have to decide what my delayed gratification quotient (DGQ) is in that moment. Five minutes? 30 minutes? Two hours? Once I know my DGQ, I slip a task of that duration in front of the fun stuff. You would be surprised at how many little annoying tasks, and sometimes big ones, you complete with the skip the line trick.

Thank you for reading this. Do you have your own little tricks you’ve devised or adopted to get things done? I would love to hear about them and pass them on to others.

This post was brought to you by the skip the line trick. Now I am off to go roller blading!

PS I would be grateful if you shared this post with others if you think they might benefit.