This Terrifying Chart Helps Me Get Things Done

I stopped putting things off when I learned to see life as one big deadline

Eric Olszewski
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Photo: Maskot/Getty Images

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a procrastinator. Whereas a disciplined person’s workflow might look something like this:

All images: Eric Olszewski

Mine looked like this:

It’s not that I didn’t care about my work — most of the time, whatever I was supposed to be doing was on my mind the entire time I was supposed to be doing it. My struggle has always been that I just couldn’t get started. I’d sit down to accomplish something, and then — fully aware of what I was doing — start clicking through the deep abyss of the internet to read up on some obscure topic, such as radial engines or human behavioral economics. Time would fly by until panic set in, at which point I’d finally buckle down and do whatever it took to get through the assignment before me.

While this method filled my life with stress and anxiety, I always took it for granted as just the…

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