Procrastination – Can you beat it?

Challenge Statement:

Many people multiple reason for doing Procrastination and there are many self-help available in the space in terms of books, video, TED talks etc. But despite that people still have not been able to make it go away or have challenge with it.

Metaphor:

Procrastination is like a credit card: it's a lot of fun until you get the bill.

This reminds of Kabir’s Doha:

काल करे सो आज कर, आज करै सो अब |

पल में परलय होयगी, बहुरी करेगा कब ||

Why this Challenge?

As I have major problem with Procrastination as you keep trying so many self help and yet at times you are always stuck with many things. We talk of priority and especially in work place the more you clear the work, the more work gets added through responsibility. Sometime I just postpone because I don’t know how to do and whom to contact or at times it feels too huge to do it. People say break the task into smaller things but how to break it is not clear. At times you can’t be a robot and keep doing work and need a break and you start feeling guilty so much has piled up in terms of Task. One of the solution is to priority, but eventually the task that don’t get done remains in the bottom and suddenly that will become in the fore front.

Proposed Solution

Phase 1:

Have a dashboard where you manually enter the details and track it.

1.       First to have to Do list of the work that needs to be completed where you enter the tentative start and end date for completing.

2.       Break the work in to multiple small task.

3.       Do you have any challenges in doing this work.

4.       What is the priority of the task. Why is it a priority? The priority needs to be in terms of total of task and not repeated.

5.       Mention the estimated time to complete the task.

6.       Actual Date of completion and time taken to complete.

7.       Mark it as complete.

Phase 2:

1.       Along with above features, introduce an option to estimate how much capacity for today.

2.       Have an autotimer, where you start and stop and start. So it will help to calculate the amount of time you take to complete the task as well as track when you were able to start and when you ended. And you mark it as complete.

3.       Automatically, shows the change in Priority of work that has changed from the previous day.

4.       Once the work is complete, it automatically removes from the to do list.

5.       You have a Dashboard in terms of how many days have to managed to clear the entire list and and Graph with respect how many task

Phase 3:

1.       Introduce an Intelligence where it automatically suggests and do it for you or recommend based on your history.

2.       Have widgets for frequently used task, where you can drag and drop.

3.       Have the capability to sync to your calendar where it calculates your capacity for that day based on your calendar meeting.

Experiment

People are willing to try the solution in various phases and give feedback. It should not be that the solution itself is so tasking and time consuming that people feel that they spend too much time in just doing the planning every day.

Hypothesis:
H0: That the person is happy with the tool and find it easy to use.

H1: The person is not happy with the tool and not using it.

Cost and capabilities:

Have a excel expert to create a template for the phase 1 which is manual process. Later we would need someone with webpage experience to design the various dashboard as well as mobile app. And have both the webpage and mobile app synced up.