Do you procrastinate?

My client Emily (not her real name) puts off financial tasks as a way to manage her anxiety over money.

Josh puts things off because he is too tired from work to even think of starting something else.

And Adrian is an artist who dislikes tedious, detailed work. He avoids it. And, so, it all starts accumulating – not only the original tasks, but the rolling consequences as well.

Here is an easy fix.

Just set a timer for 5 minutes. And just do something – anything – on that task for 5 minutes.

For Emily, it was looking at the numbers she was dreading. For Josh, it was getting started on a corner of his extremely cluttered garage. Adrian needed to start on organizing the stacks of papers that were hiding his dining room table.

They had to give themselves a bit of a push to get past anxiety.

What they found is that once they got started, they wanted to keep going. And once they got over that tiny hump, it was so much easier to do a little more the next day.

Give this a try. And tell me… how does this work for you? What’s your story?