Procrastination vs Prioritisation -A practical guide
By: Ravi Parkash Jangra
Tags: Practical Guides, Procrastination, Project Management Tips, Prioritisation

Prioritisation is the activity that arranges items or activities in order of importance relative to each other and getting things done…

Procrastination is the avoidance of doing a task that needs to be accomplished by a certain deadline. It could be further stated as a habitual or intentional delay of starting or finishing a task despite knowing it might have negative consequences…

I’ve been procrastinating this write up for almost couple weeks or may be 3–4 weeks now. Yes, you read it correctly. Then what is the point of reading someone’s article on procrastination who himself has been procrastinating it.

Fair point! I’d presume that there is some good reason that you got interested in this topic, and hence spending 5 more minutes reading this would not cost much but it is going to be very helpful because I’m going to share some important aspects here, which would help you to deal with procrastination efficiently.

This is very practical approach which can be followed easily.

Before we delve into how to deal with procrastination, here are some salient features of procrastination.

If the task at hand is important then procrastination is going to have a bad impact later in terms of loosing the opportunity, paying the fine, getting into a difficult situation later. In most of the cases doing the task will take same amount of efforts irrespective of when you do it. If you do it later, the chances are that it may take more than it takes now. I’ll tell you why!! If you keep deferring the tasks for later, it might happen you may have more tasks (may be because of procrastination) at hand that time and you just don’t have enough time. So anyone in this situation would work under pressure. In most of the cases the when you work under pressure and when you have multiple things at hand, chances are one would not be able perform optimally. It might happen that if you are deferring the tasks, you may not be in a position to complete it at all. There could be multiple reasons: In case your task is dependent on some other party (people, resources, time) then chances are not all the times you can finish your tasks. I’ll give you all a practical example. We were given an assignment which was supposed to be completed within 3 weeks. The assignment efforts were of hardly a week’s efforts and hence many of the folks became lenient and kept the assignment for last week. The assignment had a dependency on the some third party library and it just happened that 3rd party resources were not accessible for 1–2 days close to the assignment submission date and many of the folks were seen struggling. Because of unforeseen issues, you may not just enough time to complete the tasks at hand. You may be running against the time.

Now let us see how to deal with procrastination!

We have a very good tool to deal with procrastination and it is nothing but prioritisation. . Just to keep it simple let us keep 3 categories of priority of the tasks : High, Medium and Low.

Let us assign some timeframe to act on these tasks.

a. High : 0–2 days

b. Medium : 2 days-2 weeks

c. Low : More than 2 weeks

Within these buckets (especially the High and Medium Buckets) a little more stack ranking or prioritisation may be required.

Prioritise: When you get any task to perform, check its priority and add this task to respective buckets. Review these buckets regularly: High Bucket should be reviewed daily. Medium buckets should be reviewed every 2–3 days. Low bucket can be reviewed once in a week. Avoid shifting the tasks to lower buckets: There could be a genuine priority change, but if that is not the reason, then its a sign of procrastination and the frequency of this is procrastination quotient and if we do prioritisation well then there should not be a need to shift to the lower buckets. Identify the need to shift the tasks to upper buckets: When I said review each bucket regularly, I meant assign resources (people, time, prioritisation within the 3 buckets) to accomplish the task within the timeframe. Now it might happen due to some reason if some tasks are still there in the buckets for more than the timeframe, move them to upper buckets to make sure that these are accomplished without further delays. Add a 4th Bucket, DON’T DO: While it is important to keep an eye on the buckets, their tasks and their timelines, it is equally important to identify the tasks which are not to be done. Sometimes it just happens that in an attempt to do more, we try to do each and everything. So assess each task very clearly to understand whether it is solving any business problem, improving the quality of the product, improving the customer experience, improving the performance of the products, simplifying the technical complexities etc (these are just few examples and these would vary from business to business). If not, add it to DON’T DO BUCKET.

The practitioners may define their own buckets, timeframe to accomplish the tasks.

Now the answer to why I’d been postponing this writeup is that this task was in Low priority bucket :)