> One hint for what is important: Do the tasks you avoid most
There's a recently re-posted link to PG's Procrastination article[1], which argues against this:
> That's the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all procrastinators. They're type-C procrastinators: they put off working on small stuff to work on big stuff.
It all boils down as to why you avoid those tasks. Is it because you don't care about them, or because you dread their difficulty? If it's the former, maybe (it depends!) you can keep putting them off.
I've just been working on this with my add coach, the challenge is to be objective. I had some tasks pop up amd I wanted to take them on rather than work the thing I'd been putting off. But to work on the motivation for tasks I think about the payoffs for completion and why they are important and realized the thing I was putting off in this case (retrofitting a yucky code base with a slick mew interface, but not fixing any debt) was actually less important than the popup which had a short timeline and high visibility with a customer. So "do what you don't want to" doesn't always work, and there is no substitute for thinking it through.
There's a recently re-posted link to PG's Procrastination article[1], which argues against this:
> That's the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all procrastinators. They're type-C procrastinators: they put off working on small stuff to work on big stuff.
It all boils down as to why you avoid those tasks. Is it because you don't care about them, or because you dread their difficulty? If it's the former, maybe (it depends!) you can keep putting them off.
[1] http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html