My brother is getting married next month and he asked me to marry him, can you believe it? What an honor. His fiancée is wonderful, he’s happy, they are both excited, and I have to get fitted for a tux and get a one-day license allowing me to marry them.
He texted me a few weeks back asking if I’ve gotten the license yet. I had not. I looked it up and the state says you can do the license thing up to a week before the event, so I figured I had plenty of time. He texted me again last week, and I said I’m going by the end of the week, but I didn’t. So now this week he texted me again and said I need to get the tux fitted so there’s plenty of time to get it done, and also asked about the license…I haven’t gotten back to him yet.
I was hoping to shed a few pounds before getting the tux fitted, but that hasn’t happened either. But I have resolved that I’m going to do it tomorrow. Absolutely, no question. Tomorrow is Friday, so I should probably do it early to make sure there are no hang ups or SNAFUs. By the way, a SNAFU is a military acronym that means Situation Normal All F*cked Up. That pretty much sums it up for me.
So, I thought by writing this post on procrastination that I would motivate and actually go tomorrow and get my Tux fitted, and call up the state government offices and square away this marrying license thing. Man, I hope I do it and can text him back with some sort of lame excuse that I got busy, so sorry for getting back late, but don’t worry, everything has been taken care of.
The Most Important Things First
The problem is getting important things done first. And putting in perspective what is important and developing a habit out of getting that thing done before doing anything else.
My typical day starts out by reviewing my online properties, making sure traffic is as expected, revenue is coming in, there are no charge backs that have to be handled, and figuring out what to do next. Generally that means getting on social media and propagating content, adding my two cents worth, answering questions, and prepping for my afternoon live broadcast. It also means researching a topic to either write about or script a short video for the blog and Facebook accounts.
Man, now that I wrote all that down, that’s a lot of stuff. And it’s all important, it’s what keeps the business going and growing. But there are definitely some things that are way more important than others, some that are time critical, and others that are optimized by doing them early in the day rather than later.
So the question is which are the most important things or thing to do first? If I at least got that down, and shuffled around my schedule, or skipped one of the daily routines, I could do this tux thing, and probably do the marrying license as well at the same time.
I know there are several time management systems that have a routine like this. For example, Zen to Done has an acronym for it, called MIT, or Most Important Things. The routine is to make a list the night before of the three most important things you need to get accomplished tomorrow. Then when tomorrow comes, make sure you do one of those things first thing, no exceptions. The ide is that if you do this everyday, then you’re likely to maintain forward progress.
I can certainly commit to doing one thing for sure. And for tomorrow I know what that one thing should be. Do you?
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