Were you able to send the mail to your client? Amiable inquired. Oh no! I wasn't able to do that today, but unfailingly, tomorrow morning I will fix it. Very early in the morning the next day, Amiable, my upline in my real estate business, woke me up with another call, and she said, This is just a gentle reminder, Nkem, for you to send this important mail to your client who showed interest in our company's landed properties in Imo State.
I acknowledged and appreciated her call and further gave her another excuse while sending the mail should wait. I told her I will rather go see the man one on one for a better discussion instead of sending a mail to him. The funny part was how I kept procrastinating over this bussiness transaction, which I knew would give me a good profit. Would I say it is laziness or natural forces? Hehehe. The client in question was my former boss. I marketed a property to him, and coincidentally, he was looking for a property to invest in in the same state. He requested that I give him every detail about the estate, including the remaining plots available, so he can see if it's situated in a good location inside the estate.
Procrastination has proven difficult to fight and most times, it causes me more harm than good. It will interest you to know that I kept procrastinating to see this man for almost two weeks, and the very day I finally went to his office was the day another real estate marketers from the same company I work for visited his office with every piece of information the man wanted. I saw these marketers leaving the office environment as I arrived, and on getting into my client's office, he said, Wow, Nkem, I waited for you for a long time without success, and I needed to put the money I had into an investment before other things come for it. He continued, You see those two people, a young guy and a lady pointing at his CCTV camera? I just concluded the land investment with them, the same estate you told me about the other time but never showed up again. I wish you had arrived earlier or even before this day; I would have invested through you, but maybe next time.
Hmmm, I was so hard on myself listening to the whole sermon the client was giving me. I messed up big time, no doubt; procrastination ate me big time until it defeated me, but then the experience served as a great lesson to me and still does to this day.
I didn't embrace procrastination anymore but rather fight it and I started fighting it by first pushing myself to attend to every important to do list on my daily plan without leaving anyone for tomorrow. I would say that drafting a daily plan helped me achieve this. And not only did I set daily goals, but I also gave myself deadlines using my stopwatch to track my activities.
Secondly, I discovered that distractions were another factor that made me procrastinate. For instance, I will set out a task to do, and within some minutes into the task, notifications upon notifications will keep popping up on my phone, and I will shift my attention to know the latest updates from there, to social media, watching short movies, and comedies. All these usually eat into my time, and I will find myself procrastinating again. However, turning off some irrelevant notifications and applying self-discipline worked well for me on this.
There was also something I did in the past to fight procrastination, but I must confess that I am not doing that currently, but the little time I did it, it worked very well for me. It's about telling a close friend of mine about my goals and having her analyze my progress so far. She was a source of motivation to me then, and the urge to keep working hard was always there.
In conclusion, procrastination is capable of affecting our productivity level in a day, and most times, we miss out on our goals; hence, fighting it as it comes is not negotiable.
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