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.
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.
Yes, procrastination is a problem these days for most of us due to heavy responsibilities from all areas. I liked the concept of planning and recording. One more thing, we can add is to find if any task could be done in sharing or collaborative manner or delegating as well. This way we can minimize the workload on us and also get helping hands to finish the task. Also, to find the usefulness and importance of task, if not appropriate or not needed, better disregard it.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very well written. And quite practical solution for the problem. Eat that frog is a book that would add more value to your solution. Do check it out... Good work Sapna! :)
ReplyDelete