Fantasy football will cost employers $16.8 billion in lost wages this season, according to Challenger.
Workers waste a ton of time not only during football season, but year round.
According to a study by GetVoIP, 80% of workers waste some time every day; and 20% waste one-third or more of each day.
Self-employment makes any sort of time-wasting unpalatable to me (I don't want to wind up living under a bridge).
But far worse-tasting is unconscious procrastination.
Procrastination comes in two varieties: conscious (you play fantasy football, instead of phoning customers) and unconscious (you answer yesterday's emails, instead of writing a strategic plan).
The former is foolish; the latter, fatal.
If you're addicted to unconscious procrastination, ask yourself: Am I too self assured?
That was Civil War General George McClellan's problem.
As you'll recall from your history lessons, Abe Lincoln put McClellan in charge of the Union army in July 1861 after the disaster at Bull Run. McClellan then took nine months to build up his army, swelling it to an immense size—121,500 men (at the time, the largest army ever assembled by a nation).
The power went to McClellan's head. He mistook the office he'd been handed for an elected one, and began to behave as if he had a public mandate. He started seeing himself as God's instrument, chosen by Divine Providence to save his country, and even flirted with idea of dictatorship—an idea that flourished, because he surrounded himself with "Yes Men." And he held Lincoln in open contempt, calling him a "baboon" and "the original Gorilla."
But McClellan failed to use his immense army to win a victory of any size over the Confederates and end the war.
Instead, he focused on parades, supplies, campgrounds and paperwork.
He procrastinated.
An impatient Lincoln soon would fire him; but before he did, Lincoln sent McClellan a now-famous telegram that read:
Once more, let me tell you, it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow. I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as in my most anxious judgment, I consistently can. But you must act.
Are you too self-assured?
Self-employment makes any sort of time-wasting unpalatable to me (I don't want to wind up living under a bridge).
But far worse-tasting is unconscious procrastination.
Procrastination comes in two varieties: conscious (you play fantasy football, instead of phoning customers) and unconscious (you answer yesterday's emails, instead of writing a strategic plan).
The former is foolish; the latter, fatal.
If you're addicted to unconscious procrastination, ask yourself: Am I too self assured?
That was Civil War General George McClellan's problem.
As you'll recall from your history lessons, Abe Lincoln put McClellan in charge of the Union army in July 1861 after the disaster at Bull Run. McClellan then took nine months to build up his army, swelling it to an immense size—121,500 men (at the time, the largest army ever assembled by a nation).
The power went to McClellan's head. He mistook the office he'd been handed for an elected one, and began to behave as if he had a public mandate. He started seeing himself as God's instrument, chosen by Divine Providence to save his country, and even flirted with idea of dictatorship—an idea that flourished, because he surrounded himself with "Yes Men." And he held Lincoln in open contempt, calling him a "baboon" and "the original Gorilla."
But McClellan failed to use his immense army to win a victory of any size over the Confederates and end the war.
Instead, he focused on parades, supplies, campgrounds and paperwork.
He procrastinated.
An impatient Lincoln soon would fire him; but before he did, Lincoln sent McClellan a now-famous telegram that read:
Once more, let me tell you, it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow. I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as in my most anxious judgment, I consistently can. But you must act.
Are you too self-assured?
