One of the most important skills you can develop is how to manage your time efficiently. Know yourself and your personality. If you are a procrastinator, you need to seriously examine your thinking and take steps to change this pattern. This does not happen overnight it takes hard work and planning.
The first step is to identify why you avoid doing a certain visit or task. Let’s face it some visits are more enjoyable than others. There may a provider that is particularly unpleasant and you put off visiting her or you may have some paperwork that is very tedious and you keep putting it off. You need to look a little deeper and ask yourself:
Do you put off a visit because you know the visit will become confrontational and you hate confrontation?
Do you put off paperwork because you do not clearly understand how to do it?
Has putting tasks off just become a habit?
You must identify the underlining problem before you can correct it.
Here are a few tips to helping to break the procrastinating habit:
1. Schedule your most difficult tasks first. When you leave them to the end of the month, you will spend unnecessary time worrying and stressing over doing the task. Once it is completed you can relax and finish the rest of your tasks without it hanging over your head.
2. Make a schedule. Organize your week with the visits and work you have to do. Examine your schedule and ask yourself:
Do I have enough time for each visit?
Have I allotted enough time to get from home to home allowing for time of day and traffic?
Have I left space for emergency visits or inspections? Have I allotted time for paperwork?
3. Identify your priority tasks. Often investigations take priority over regular scheduled visits. Rearrange your schedule immediately. Do not try to jam it into an already busy schedule, but rearrange your visits possibly rescheduling some visits to allow for enough time to complete all your tasks.
4. Daily examine your schedule. Plans do not always work out as we want. There are things we cannot control, such as the weather. Always reschedule immediately, do not wait and let tasks pile up.
For example: A snowstorm has made it necessary to cancel your visits for the day. You know you are going to have to reschedule those visits. Look at your schedule and see if you can get any paperwork task done and reschedule your visits during the time you had scheduled your paperwork.
Getting into the habit of making a realistic schedule daily, weekly and monthly, and sticking to that schedule will help you to correct your procrastinating habit.