Productivity Secrets from a Serial Procrastinator

Hi, my name is Dean and I am a procrastinator… and today I am going to show you how I managed to do 7 days worth of work in 3 hours.

YOU: “But Dean, who are you to teach us about productivity? Afterall, you struggle with it”

ME: “Shut up”

YOU: “No!”

ME: “damnit”

Listen, I don’t like to take advice from people who are naturally good at stuff, after all, they are naturally good at it. So they probably are not good at teaching something that comes naturally to them.

I had this when I was dating a Spanish girl, and she couldn’t teach me Spanish, as she didn’t know how to learn Spanish, she just picked it up as a child. However, she taught English far better than I could.

Anyway, where was I?

Ah yes, Procrastination…

Here is the trick…

Mega, Super, Uber-strict deadlines.

I don’t mean kinda strict, I mean stricter than a teacher from the 1950’s.

For example, if something would normally take you 5 days, set the deadline at 5 hours.

Seriously.

I did this yesterday, we had a high-end client coming to our offices as part of our Platinum Coaching club… so, I decided to create some training material for them. However, I had 3 hours before they arrived.

What followed was 3 hours of zero distraction, super fast and effective work, and I created a 20-page training manual, specific to their niche.

Normally, that would take me 4 or 5 days, allowing for distractions, adding images, research, writing, editing etc…

I did it in 3 hours.

Parkinson’s Law

There is logic to this madness… there is a law called “Parkinson’s Law” that states that a task will expand to fill the time allocated to it.

In other words, if a task takes 2 hours, and you set your deadline at 2 weeks, you will find a way of dragging it out over 2 weeks.

However, the opposite is true.

If you want to create a product that would normally take a month… set yourself a deadline of one weekend. You WILL find a way of getting it done.

Make yourself accountable.

I had the pressure of the clients coming down to be trained, I had no choice but to create it.

For our next product, we will teach the entire course via a webinar to a few BuzzProfits.com members. This way, I will HAVE to prepare the course, otherwise, I am going to look a right idiot when they are on the training call.

Another way would be to bet a friend.

Bet $5 you can do the task in record time.

So there we go, how to do 5 days work in 3 hours.

And remember, if I can do it, ANYONE can do it.

Dean – The Ex Serial Procrastinator