Rita Perea is president and CEO of Rita Perea Leadership Coaching and Consulting, specializing in working with senior leaders to successfully engage employees, lead teams, manage change and balance work and life.
Being at the top of your game day after day, and living your life to its fullest, requires the development of successful time mastery habits. “Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today,” carries the classic wisdom from a very accomplished Benjamin Franklin.
As an executive coach and a certified work-life balance specialist, I have had many clients who express a feeling of being overwhelmed with “too much to do and not enough time to do it.” This feeling of not knowing where to begin can lead to inertia, being weighed down and unable to move. They find themselves in a full-blown habit of procrastination – putting things off until tomorrow, or the next day, or the next day.
At one time or another we have all fallen prey to the self-sabotaging behavior of putting important tasks aside until “some other time”. Unfortunately for some who are stuck in the avoidance cycle, another time never magically appears. This is the opposite of the Nike tag line “Just Do It”. In our culture winners achieve results and losers just do nothing. To be self-actualized at work and in our personal lives, we need to overcome the behaviors that shoot us in the foot, often making us feel badly about ourselves.
I am not sure about you, but when I have email that I have not processed in a timely manner it feels like a huge weight around my neck. Unprocessed email causes me stress, anxiety and sleepless nights worrying about what is in my inbox that I am not attending to. Does this sound familiar?
