7 Ways To Stop Procrastinating
In todays blog we are going to talk about some very useful and easy to use tips and tricks on how to get off our lazy butts and stop procrastinating on that thing you know you need to do, but don’t want to do; and instead watch your 5th rerun of our favourite show.
So without further ado let us get into the first tip on how to stop procrastinating…
1) Get Organised
We tend to not realise how important our environment is to our productivity. When we work in a messy/scattered environment, our mind is messy/scattered and we can easily become distract by the things around us. So it might be a good idea take stock of what is in our room and work area in order to create a more productive environment which is more conducive to focused work. When you think about it, say you are looking for 1 specific piece of paper and your entire desk is full of hundreds of files, papers etc. It will take you ages to find that one piece of paper, but if everything is put into a neat and orderly filing system, you will be able to find it with ease. That is what we are trying to create, an environment that aids you in concentration on tasks you need to perform. While yes you may not have that exact scenario happen to you, but it serves as an example of how hard it is to do focused work in a chaotic environment. Creating a clean environment will aid us in being more productive, as we feel more professional if we are working in a clean and orderly environment as opposed to unfilled with leftover crumbs and old scraps of paper everywhere. It’s a lot harder to take pride in your work area if it’s disorderly. It also helps boost your motivation as the act of cleaning your room is taking action, it’s moving us from doing nothing to doing something which gets us more active and will help us create the energy to work.
2) The Law of Inertia
Motivation does not equal action. Action creates motion which leads to motivation. We often feel like we need to wait for that burst of motivation in order to get going or feel inspired enough to tackle that mountain in-front of us. That simply isn’t true, and if it were true, we would not do much in our lives. We do not necessarily feel motivated to do most of the things that we do in our day to day life, but we do it because we have created a habit around it; thus it does not require huge amounts of activation energy for us to do those tasks, for example making our beds in the morning, or taking a shower. So that completely debunks the motivation myth. We therefore need to take small actions which help us create motion and thus from that motion we start to get motivated as we are already in the process of doing things at that point. It may be hard to from sitting on the coach eating pizza and watching squid games for the 2nd time, to jump up and start writing our thesis for university, or work on a big corporate project; because we are going from complete in motion to full throttle work. However if we decide to start by cleaning our work area, dusting our chair, and prepping our environment, we are already in motion and when we are in motion its much easier to transition to other tasks. It’s like the law of inertia, if you are moving at a constant speed and the vehicle stops your body is still moving at that constant speed. So if you are going from 0 aka, from the coach to transition to doing a hard task, your body will resist the sudden change in flow. But if you constantly build up that momentum and change lanes to doing difficult tasks your body’s internal inertia will go forward.
3) Prioritise
Before your work day begins, it is a good idea to create a daily highlight or schedule your most important tasks of the day in your calendar and prioritise them in order of importance. There is a productivity hack that is known as “eat that frog” from Mark Twain. This basically means tackle the most difficult task of the day first, the one you do not want to do most, because odds are that is the task you are going to procrastinate on the most. So if you do that first thing, the rest of your day will go much smoother. The same rule applies if you have two big priorities to do for the day, prioritise the bigger one first. We generally put it off saying I’ll do it later sometime in the not so distant future, and we eventually don’t get to it that day. This however creates a problem as we have 2 frogs to eat the next day as each day has its own frog for the day. We cannot just elect to not eat that frog, it will be there every single day and keep on piling up if we do not take the active decision to get it done and over with as quickly as possible. We tend to rather focus on first doing a bunch of smaller tasks like checking you our email, sending messages, etc. because we get that feeling that we are accomplishing things and checking stuff off our to do list. This makes us feel good, but generally these are not really important tasks and our time would have been better spent if we just forced ourselves to do the hard tasks first. After finishing our hardest task for the day we will feel so much better and be motivated to do even more, which creates a positive feedback loop.
So how to prioritise your tasks? I often just use a day journal to write down roughly and schedule my tasks for the day and allocate the time I need for each individual task. If you do not like using an old journaling or calendar system, google calendar is really great way to schedule and notify yourself of all the tasks you need to do beforehand.
4) Set Deadlines:
Another helpful tool you can use in order to beat procrastination and have some solid commit behind the tasks you want to accomplish is by setting a deadline for those tasks. Now if you’re thinking about just setting a deadline, like writing it in your calendar, you might think “well, its super easy for me to just not stick to that deadline, so why bother setting one?” And yes, if that is how you set a deadline, you are very likely not stick with it if you aren’t already in the habit of sticking to your own self imposed deadlines. The thing that makes deadlines really work is if there is some sort of pain or pleasure associated with the deadline. For example when I was in school when we needed to hand in a big project, if we were late in handing it in, every day the project was late we would be dedicated 10% off the final grade. This made everyone make sure they handed in their projects on time, because no one wanted to suffer the consequences of that deduction. That was an example of an external deadline, and most of the deadlines we set for ourselves are internal; so how do we create pain or pleasure for our own deadlines? You can very easily create pain by telling a trusted friend about your deadlines and if you do not reach it, you can give him $100 dollars. It has to be something you really don’t want to do. You can even create a mini contract with your friend if that will make it feel more official to you. There are also websites online where you can pay a certain amount if you do not meet your deadlines on time, and it will actually take money from your account.
5) TAKE A BREAK:
It is important to remember to take breaks, as we only have so much time we can really focus on a task before we start to lose focus and start to have depreciating returns on the input we are giving; however this should not be abused. The average adult can concentrate for no longer than 90 minutes before needing a break. Some studies say we can only concentrate on one thing for about 40-45 minutes. Being more productive also means knowing your limits and what your body needs before you start going into declining results; at which point it is better for you to do something else or take a small break.
If you are in a bad head space and are starting to become frustrated at the task you are supposed to be doing, it may be a good idea, just to take a breath, take a short break and do some light stretching; or get some water and fresh air to calm down. This will help you refocus and get yourself in the right head space to focus on your deep work tasks.
If we however, want to enter into flow state and really focus for a few hours on some deep work, taking breaks may not be what you want to do; as you are interrupting your flow and it’s going to take you some time to get back into that state of deep focus. So if you want to focus on deep work for a substantial amount of time, limit your distractions and make sure you are in the right mindset beforehand, so as to minimise the need for breaks and to enable you to enter a flow state so much better.
6) The 5 minute rule:
The 5 minute rule. The 5 minute rule is basically as simple as it sounds. If you are really struggling to get going on something you are procrastinating about, just use this simple hack. Say to yourself that you are only going to work on that task you are putting off for 5 minutes, that’s all. That’s a lot less daunting than knowing outright that you need to spend 6 hours on a given task. So just take 5 minutes and focus on making progress on that task. This will inevitably go on for longer than 5 minutes and you will potentially make considerable progress on that task. This may not work for some of you at first because you realise you’re essentially trying to trick yourself, and know you’ll still work a long time on it. If that’s you, then actually only work for 5 minutes, get up afterwards and do something fun for 5 minutes and come back and repeat the process. This is so you start to build that positive association with working on your task. Then after a few times of doing that you will naturally start to work on the task for longer as time goes on, till you go on for much longer.
It’s a lot easier to say to yourself: “ok today I will write 2 sentences” than to say, “ok I’m going to write 1 whole chapter of my first book today”. That’s how the 5 minute rule works. If you can focus on a small task and not get overwhelmed, you will keep going on performing many of those small tasks till it accumulates into a big accomplishment like writing a chapter. Remember that the goal isn’t the finished chapter, the goal is to make progress everyday. By doing these simple exercises we are training ourselves to be more comfortable with doing hard work.
How you can easily implement this is by getting out a timer, use your phone if need be but remember we want to try and avoid using our phones if we are focusing on deep work tasks; and then set a timer for 5 minutes.
7) Reward Yourself:
Reward yourself for your efforts. No one wants to keep performing difficult tasks and not be rewarded in some way afterwards. That makes you a bad master of yourself if you are only cracking the whip and not giving yourself a reward for your own efforts. You might think its unnecessary to reward yourself, you might think your reward is the finished product itself, before moving on the the next task. While yes we all get satisfaction from having completed something, it is also important to take some time to pat ourselves on the back before moving on to the next task. If we do that, that will create a positive feedback cycle to our brain telling us that “oh hey, when I did that difficult thing I got a reward, maybe its not so bad after all, I’ll remember that next time” and you slowly start to build up your tolerance and discipline for handling difficult tasks, and in the long run those tasks may not require a gigantic amount of activation energy from you in order to start doing those hard tasks. The inverse of that however is if you do not reward yourself for a job well done your brain will say “I did all this hard work, and now it’s done, ok cool… wait why are we going onto the next thing already I need a break, wait stop, this is suffering arghhh”. Ok its not that bad but you get the point. Your brain will see that you had to do a lot of difficult work and then if there is no positive association to be made, it will try and avoid that task next time because why would it want to do something that it got no benefit from? So keep that in mind when you are planning your schedule for the day.
Quick Bonus Tips On How to Decrease Procrastination:
A few key side notes to point out, is that you should make sure that you are taking care of yourself in order to be functioning at your optimum capability. Here are a few small things we often forget that can aid us hugely in taking care of ourselves and ultimately working more effectively:
Making sure you have proper ventilation while working so your brain can think clearly and you are provided with enough fresh oxygen.
Make sure you are seated and working ergonomically to protect yourself from getting back and wrist problems when working from a desk.
Turning off notifications or placing your phone face down and on airplane mode in order that you will not get distracted by messages or calls while in a deep work state.
Remember to drink a lot of water while working so you stay hydrated.
All these ideas are things I have learned from other people and most of these ideas I have came across first in the book Atomic Habits by James Clear and from Mark Manson his books and also his Youtube channel, check them out. They are all absolutely phenomenal books and I will probably do a book review on some of them into the future…
Till next time, goodbye friends.
