Yun-Yih Chen is a social media specialist and student at Humber.
As a student or office worker, how do you do your job? Get it done as soon as possible? Or try to procrastinate? When I first started working at the service center I often encounter situation that I always can’t get the work done within a predetermined period of time, so I often drag my colleagues down and am more prone to dispute with them. I consider myself as a person who likes to use systems thinking, which means finding a solution for the problem, to face the challenge of work, and I like to find ways to improve from the structural surface. In addition, how to work more efficiently and more time for myself had become another subject that I need to re-learn in my work. Eventually, I came up with a solution which is to cooperate with another colleague and assess our work; he will be responsible for the portion of his expertise, and I will learn from him when I am doing my work.
For many workers or students, the sense of “not enough time” occurs frequently. Since I hold this feeling I was deeply touched when I read the new book of Torihara Takashi who is a Japanese business consultant. The most interesting part in this book is that the authors advise the reader to re-examine the content of the work with 15 kinds of thinking.
Among them, the chapter which evokes me the most is when Takashi asked readers a question: do you work in the “installments” approach? According to his observations, if the following three kinds of phenomena often appear to work, it is likely to make people fall into an “installment” dilemma.
- Always be chased by the same job.
- Regardless of how hard you work, there is always work that needs to be done.
- Feel rushed every day, it’s time to start again when you finish your job.
The causes of these conditions are that people cannot finish the work right away and always thinking that I will do that later. It’s like you didn’t pay the current period card bills after you spent by credit card and these balances (unfinished work) will begin to produce the circulated interest. Along with the interests is the feeling of increasingly heavy burden. A lot of work that cannot be completed immediately often make people spend more time and effort to get them done. If you always have to pay card debt, it is difficult to accumulate wealth for yourself. Similarly, it is not easy to make the “card slaves” in the workplace to have good performances on their jobs. Takashi said that as there are limits of a credit card, the workload and working time that people can afford are also limited. The more people procrastinate, they will get into a state of “did not buy anything, but still paying for the card debt”.
A lot of people who have a strong work ability and responsibility cannot get the job done because they are doing their job by stages and unable to complete their tasks at once. The reason that they are not able to take a breath from endless tasks is that they take the work which are over their abilities.
As an office worker, our working schedule might be affected by executives and customers, but the proposal from Takashi still is a great reminder. He said that we have to always practice to complete work immediately, because this kind of work that cannot be resolved right away will only make us become the card slaves in workplaces, we have to work harder but it is more difficult to put out a high quality outcome. If you are always chased by your tasks, what do you think the quality of your work will be? Or do you have a plan to deal with?
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Hey! i really liked your blog! telling honestly, it is what’s happening to me right now. Since i recently started working at a gas station, i have to do night shifts, which is mandatory for the people who started working recently, it was good for a day, since i was excited to get a job and start earning on my own. On my very next shift i started getting thoughts about my homework while i was working, and when i did my homework, i used to get worried that diid i complete all my work on the list? this was a drastic blow, i started going under stress, then i spoke to my dad and he advised me to manage my work and do one at a time. This helped me to get my work done, get proper sleep and do good on my academics as well. I will search for the book you mentioned in your post, and surely refer to other people, who are going through the same part.
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Procrastination is definitely something that affects us all, some more than others. I have often spent time pondering why I do this, perhaps a decent of use of my time procrastinating! I have also read some interesting books with interesting theories on how to get things done. For me personally, I feel that I procrastinate because I do not like working in stages, and getting things simply ‘done’ isn’t what I want to do. I want them to be great! When I think of doing work, I think of having to sit down and do the whole thing all at once and produce a quality project. That’s the only way I feel like I’ve gotten anything done. I recently read part of a novel by David Allen, an expert on this sort of thing. In his book, Getting Things Done, he explains that the best way to approach a task is to decide what currently needs to be done with the task, and then when finished, what the very next step is. You mentioned how managers and co-workers can get in the way of your schedule. To deal with this, avoid planning the entire project in one shot, instead just always remain one step ahead. That way when life gets in the way, or bosses, it won’t be so much of a problem.
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