How to Stop Procrastinating: a simple Guide to Mastering Difficult Tasks and Breaking the Procrastination Habit

The Lesson of the Big Rocks Story
If you want to be effective in your personal and professional life, it’s best
to have only five rocks in the jar at any given time. These rocks may
represent working on a project you want to accomplish, spending time
with your family, practicing your faith, focusing on your education, or
mentoring other people. Your top five big rocks need to go in the jar first,
or they will never get in at all.
If you can identify the important things in your life ahead of time and set
aside the time you need to work on them, then in the long run it’s okay to
procrastinate on the pebbles.
That’s why I recommend scheduling your activities with a weekly review
and using this schedule as a framework for making those day-to-day
decisions about where to focus your efforts.
Once a week (I prefer Fridays or Sundays), look at the next seven days
and schedule the activities you’d like to accomplish. You can do this by
completing the five following actions.
Action #1: Answer Three Questions
Each weekly review should start with a few minutes of critical thinking
about the next seven days. This is the time to mentally review your
immediate goals and what deserves your attention. You can do this by
answering three basic questions:
1. What are my personal obligations?
2. What are my priority projects?
3. How much time do I have?
Your responses to these questions are extremely important, because they
will determine the amount of time that can be devoted to your goals
during the next seven days.
The lesson here is that you shouldn’t schedule your week with hundreds
of activities, which is the quickest path to that feeling of overwhelm.

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Instead, it’s better to recognize, ahead of time, a realistic amount of time
that can be dedicated to your goals and five core projects.