Reverse prioritization
Somewhere in my life, I learned to reverse prioritize. It's probably the worse thing someone can do if they want to accomplish anything, but I find myself doing it still. I can't tell if it's some sort of really, really bad habit that I can change, or if it's a deeper coping mechanism that would need years of psycho therapy to work out. Or if I really just need a good, swift kick in the head.
Reverse prioritization, by the way, is when you do the simple and/or inconsequential tasks first, leaving the big ones for later. It's sort of a busy-work procrastination. You get 30 little things done and feel good about your day, even though the one big thing you needed to do (like pay a bill etc.) didn't get done.
A perfect example of this is the state of my email, and the fact that I'm blogging about it instead of actually digging in. The more important an email is the more I delay actually answering it. This can even be followed to its logical end: If an email is really, really important and I really, really want to answer it well... pretty much it'll never get responded to.
Consequently, I suck at networking, *and* I have a massive backlog of both important emails and vital tasks to take care of.
I read somewhere that this sort of thing was called "productive procrastination". Let me tell you, very succinctly, that as someone who has done this all his life? There is nothing productive about it.
-Russ