The Scanners Book of Tricks

These are some tips to help make life easier for Scanners who are in a panic about what to do next or how to do everything at once. These tips come from the Book - Refuse to Choose.

1 - Make your mental to-do list and then cut it in half.

So if you need to go do shopping and run some errands, do the shopping today so that you have food, but leave the errands until tomorrow.

2 - Get more help than you need.

Scanners often claim it is a waste of time asking others to help. Usually because the person helping will just make a mess and the Scanner will end up doing anyway so they might as well so it right from the start.

I know that's how I feel when asking for help.

But as Barbara reminds us, Scanners need to take rest breaks too.

3 - Grab your time first.

I do this every morning. I wake up at 0630 and have 30 minutes of ME time before I wake the kids up at 0700 and start getting them ready for school. If I don't get my ME time, my mornings usually do not end up going well at all.

4 - Ignore everything except your favourite part - until they HAVE to be done.
(Paraphrased by ME)

There are some jobs that I hate having to do because there are some parts of that job that I hate doing. So I tend to procrastinate and not do the job at all. Eventually I am forced into doing the job when things start piling up because I hate putting things away.  Things such as ironing the clean clothes out of the laundry basket, and the putting away the clean dishes from the dishwasher, and so on.

 5 - Learn to sort things that come at you fast. Choose a category for how urgent they are and sort them immediately.

Sometimes Scanners cannot avoid a flood of things happening all at once. Murphys law says this WILL HAPPEN. So learn to decide quickly - later, tomorrow, next week, urgent, get some help, not possible, Do this now.

 6 - The set up and the 2 minute break.

Keep a project handy that you can work on for 2 minutes at a time, whenever you get a break. One example is when the family is watching TV. Every commercial break, you spend the commercial break doing that activity, and then come back to the family when the next program session begins. It's easy enough to do chores during those commercial breaks as well.