Mining your procrastination for insight

Since December I’ve been doing an activity called the Sunday Summit – taught to me by Christine Kane.

For 20-30 min each Sunday, I use Christine’s model to reflect on the prior week and plan for the week ahead.

One of her Sunday Summit prompts is to identify any unmade decisions.

I’m pretty fascinated by decisions. I’ve written about decision fatigue specifically because there are so many ways we can restore energy to our lives by streamlining small decisions.

The spirit behind this Sunday Summit question is a little different.

It’s more like, “are there any decisions I am putting off but they are still taking up valuable head space in the back of my mind?”

These decisions are sort of like an app that is running in the background on your phone. If you don’t have a lot going on it’s fine…but eventually your battery is running out of juice and things are taking a long time to load.

A backlog of unmade decisions can cloud our ability to consider other challenges clearly, even when they are unrelated! I notice that even a small number of unmade decisions can be draining if there are a lot of other stressors active in my life.

I also find that the pattern of unmade decisions from week to week can help me spot areas of my work that I am avoiding. Now these unmade decisions become a neon flashing light blinking at me: “Growth Opportunity Here!”

Perhaps ironically, given that I cheerfully write to you all every week, I often delay decisions related to being seen out there in the world for my work.

Point being, we put off things for all kinds of reasons, that are totally natural, logical, and just downright human.

We all may have a personal flavor of things we avoid…and why. But the fruits of looking at this resistance are universally sweet.

Of course, sometimes I have unmade decisions because they are administrative or non-urgent – but even there I find the weekly tracking useful. It prompts me to think: “is there someone else that could be making these decisions so that I don’t spend the energy thinking about it?”

As anyone who has tried to delegate knows, the act of delegating skillfully and successfully is a practice we continually explore as executives and leaders.

So there again – even in the small stuff this reflection bears great fruits!

Do you have a weekly reflection process that you find really supports you?

Or are you interested in help imagining one?

Send me a message here and let me know what is working, or not, for you right now!

Love,

Marijke Ocean