Breaking bad habits

Sometimes when you've fallen into a routine of bad habits, the best thing is to change things up so that it forces you to break out of the routine.

A good example is my workweek and related procrastination.  One of my clients assigns weekly work.  They had been assigning it on Monday and Tuesday, and making it due toward the end of the week.  I was frequently doing the work over the weekend, and from there I started rolling it over into the beginning of the following week.  A clever suggestion from my client might have fixed this problem, though.

Instead of running the work on a Monday-through-Friday schedule, we're going to shift things a few days and assign things at the end of the week, due the beginning or middle of the next week.  So basically my weeks, at least with this client, will be Thursday through Wednesday, instead of the usual.

This should accomplish a few things.  One, it'll stagger my work for this client, which is helpful with other clients who assign on a weekly basis -- this way I won't have all my deadlines around the same time.  Two, it'll force me to utilize the first few days every week, when my workload is typically (or has been) lighter, before all my weekly assignments come in.  Finally, since my weekends tend to be pretty busy, it'll take the pressure off of getting my work done then.  Although Monday through Wednesday is still pretty busy, it's at least a set schedule, which makes it predictable.

It still remains to be seen whether this helps me to reconfigure my schedule and eliminate some of my procrastinating, but I am hopeful!