Pre-crastination

It is telling that we have a word for putting things off — procrastination — but not for solving problems as soon as you can. I would like to suggest ‘precrastination’ as the term, because pre means before and crastination sounds awful, so you definitely want to do things before they become awful.

I can tell you that pre- and pro-crastination are both just habits. You are not a procrastinator, it’s just a habit you have built over many years. If you like procrastinating, stop reading. If not, here’s the way I made pre-crastination a habit:

1 — have a way you keep track of all of the things you need to do. I would suggest using a dedicated tool for this. I use an app called ‘remember the milk’ but there are tons of task managers, use anything that lets you get a task in very quickly and then easily organize and prioritize later.

2 — once a day (I do it at the end but you could do it. first thing, whatever works for you) take things on your list and organize them. I prioritize them and tag them. I usually prioritize anything I want to get done as ‘Medium’ at the beginning of each week and then move things to ‘High’ when I’m trying to get them done that day.

Tagging is orthogonal to prioritizing and is some grouping scheme that makes sense to you based on the type of tasks. For example, if you are a ceo you might have fundraising, hiring, and communicating as buckets which tasks go into.

3 — once you have a prioritized and tagged your list, schedule blocks of time by tagged category. For example, I have a tag called ‘Power’ which is all of the mundane stuff I need to do. I usually need about three power hours per week to keep my queue from growing. You need to schedule the time or you won’t do it. You need to figure out how many blocks you need per week to keep your queue from growing.

There are a couple of great things about this. First, you will stop screwing around between meetings. That alone will likely double the amount you get done. Second, you will start a positive feedback loop. Once you start knocking things down every day, you start to feel under control, which makes you want to keep doing it.

4 — the idea behind pre-crastination is queueing theory. If your queue just continuously grows, you are going to go back to procrastinating. So this step is about triage; how do you get your queue under control so that you can knock down the same number of things that come in each week? I usually do this reflection once a week on Sunday evenings. There are a few things I’ve noticed over the many years I have been doing this.

a — do I need to adjust the amount of time I’m spending with people vs. getting things done. there is no ideal balance between working with people and getting things done. It depends on your personality and the nature of what you are working on. But if your queue keeps growing and everything seems important, the amount of time you spend getting things done vs meeting with people could be part of the solution.

b — Sometimes I enter too many things that bother me, but they aren’t important enough for me to spend time fixing them. This is a form of therapy, because I cross them off the list and since I have acknowledged them, they usually bother me less. If they keep bothering me, they go back on the list and i fix them.

c — very often I am trying to do too many things. This builds up over time because as you accept responsibility for something new, you rarely stop doing something else. So looking at what you have to do at once makes it much more clear when you have had what programmers call ‘feature creep’ — a bunch of extra stuff that doesn’t add value and does add friction. Cut out your feature creep.

d — very commonly with founders, you suck at delegating. There definitely is such a thing as delegating too much, but I have almost never seen it in a founder. You are a natural do’er. It feels good, so you keep jumping in and trying to fix things. Believe me, you would not have achieved success if you didn’t approach life that way. But there are often times where you have over-committed to important things and need to find someone else to do them.

To move yourself to pre-crastination and being in control of your time and life, you need to build the habit. As with all habits, start small. Just dumping stuff on the list during the day and organizing it at night can lead to some pretty great insights. Step 4 is a biggie, so have it in mind at first but just run the process for a few weeks before making big life changes.

Let me know how this goes. I guarantee that once you do it for a while. It becomes automatic and your life gets much less stressful.