I, along with countless others, procrastinate. Not as much as I used to, but I still must stay vigilant lest I go off on a tangent or sucked down a rabbit hole that winds up costing me 15, 30, or even 60 minutes, time lost forever.
It started during my school years when no assignment or test got my attention until it was right upon me, which helps explain my less than stellar academic career.
It became painfully obvious that procrastination wasn’t helping me achieve my goals, so I had to learn how to overcome it, or at least deal with its deleterious effects. I tried various techniques, such as denying myself a pleasure that I looked forward to until I completed the dreaded task, which was only marginally effective.
In his book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey taught us to differentiate between important and nonimportant and urgent vs nonurgent. Picture in your mind (or draw on a sheet of paper) a horizontal line with important above the line and unimportant below. Then bisect the horizontal line with a perpendicular line with urgent to the left and nonurgent to the right. That will produce four quadrants; important/urgent in to upper left, important/ nonurgent in the upper right, nonimportant/nonurgent in the lower right and non/important/urgent in the lower left.
Just classifying your tasks into the appropriate quadrant can be an effective remedy against procrastination, at least pertaining to the urgent items. But as Covey points out, doing nonimportant tasks just because they are urgent while neglecting important tasks because they are nonurgent is a fools game. Important tasks must be addressed even if they are not urgent, while unimportant tasks that are urgent should be delegated.
Most people would agree that addressing one’s life insurance situation is important, with different people assigning various degrees of urgency to it. It may feel like it should be placed in the upper right quadrant, important/nonurgent. But because tomorrow is promised to no one, it should be, in my opinion, be in the upper left quadrant and treated as urgent.
Your second block of text...