Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Tips for procrastinators: How to be punctual for work or school

Are you always late for work or school? Are you always set your alarm 30 minutes earlier for yourself to have time to clean up yourself, but you hit the snooze button so that you continue sleep another 15 minutes. Next,it turns out that you have to rush to clean up yourself and late for work/school. I bet you come to the right place. I rarely late for work/school as a result of a thing that I do to make myself punctual - "Set all my clocks to be running on a future time"

I have this weird habit since high school to make myself to be punctual for any events. The time of my clock and watch during high school was 30 minutes ahead of the actual time. About 2 years back when I was still in University, I set the time of my clock and watch an hour faster. So, I always be the first one who arrived at the lecture hall. Sometime when I reached the lecture hall and I saw no body was inside, I would have confused myself that I saw the wrong time table. After I called my friends for time table, then only I realized that the time of my watch was an hour faster. Usually, I used the EXTRA time to do self study inside the empty lecture hall.

However, this technique will only be useful if you are able to make yourself forget that you set your time ahead of the actual time. It will not be useful if you set time of your clock 30 minutes faster but you hit the snooze button and continue to sleep for another 45 minutes. This is normal and it happened to me during university when I got used to the time I set and my mind would auto-deduct an hour from the current time and I became late for my classes. But after a short while, I found a remedy for this problem - "Make myself not to get used to the time that I set". Once a while, I will set my clocks back to normal time and then I will set the time ahead after one or two weeks. With this way, I will not get used with the advance time that I set on my clock or watch.

Steps of this technique:-
1. Set all your clocks time to a future time (all depends on how much time you need to continue procrastinate, FYI, now I am 20 minutes ahead of the actual time)
2. Set all your clocks time back to normal time after about a month
2. Set all your clocks time to a future time again.

I have been practicing this for years and it works well for me. Try it out yourself and let me know if this works for you.

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