Nothing makes a person more productive than the last minute.– Unknown
This is especially true for me. I will be trying to complete something for the longest time but the real work happens in the last moments. It is a frustrating thing and I have come up with various techniques to solve this. Some of them are effective at various times but generally, this is still true of me as it might be of many. Nothing makes me more productive than the last minute looming up.
It takes a lot of effort to beat procrastination and get a complex thing done with a single deadline. Almost all of the work piles up and accumulates at the last minute when you have no choice but to do it anyway you can. Finishing such a task ahead of time is not impossible, just very difficult; and it gets even more difficult when you have to do this for one task after another.
The technique that works most of the time is splitting up a complex task into sub-tasks and assign each a separate deadline. Now, you have separate deadlines to deal with, and hence different last minutes. You will be productive multiple times and the task will get easier to complete. The problem with this is that sometimes breaking a task into sub-tasks is a big task in itself. By the time you get that done properly, you would have little time left for the actual job.
However, once you get the hang of splitting the task properly, it is the simplest thing to complete it. The challenge then is to identify a proper break-up of a task. This, unfortunately, is not easy to learn and would hurt you before it lets you master it. An improper problem break-up might not just delay things a little but make you start all over again. There are various rules and methods, often called best-practices, which can be used as a guideline to break up a task. These best-practices may again differ depending on the nature of the task and the knowledge as to which one should be applied comes with experience. This, though, is a bit easier to get started with than tackling the problem full-on.
I will probably cover this in more detail in other posts. This is a light-hearted quote to show the effects of procrastination. Tackling it is a subject that is written about in many books and yet, remains a big problem today. Procrastination is a manifestation of laziness and laziness is not always bad. Someone said that the world progress today because of the lazy. More on that later, though.
P.S. I was very busy last Tuesday and hence there was no quote. I knew I would not be able to write it but missed mentioning it in the previous post. Sorry about that.
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