Last week, I put off doing a mountain of administrative work, and boy, did those chickens come home to roost.
Instead of spending a few minutes a day putting info in my CRM, hand-writing follow-up cards, and updating my calendar, I faced nearly two and a half hours of that work, a fit punishment for procrastinating.
But, because I'm a woman of my word, and I firmly believe that if you have a process for follow-up and record-keeping, you have to follow it EVERY TIME, I buckled down and did the work. I wrote nearly a dozen cards, put a week's worth of meeting notes in my CRM, and cleaned up my calendar.
When it was done, I felt better, but I also knew that I'd made the task a million times harder than it had to be, simply because I'd put off 'til tomorrow work that should have been done that day. Work that isn't terribly unpleasant in 15 or 20 minute increments can become painful when you have to do it for much longer.
Lesson learned: now I know not to leave my desk at night until all my follow-ups are done.