3 Ways to Beat Procrastination
Ah, procrastination. Look, I’m not going to make you feel horrible about procrastinating the task in front of you. I get it. I really do. I can shamelessly watch Season 1 to Season 5 of Ellen in one sitting and restart the Pilot after Vows ends instead of starting on the task that’s right in front of me and due in 12 hours. It happens. Our brain seeks comfort. But we can’t sit procrastinating for forever now, can we? We have things to do whether we like it or not and we have to get them done. Yet, we would very much rather be doing something else. Maybe you are reading this post right now instead of working on the report you are supposed to turn in. I gotchu. Let me help you out to the best of my abilities.
Now, procrastination is just that resistance to doing the thing that’s in front of you, right? It happens for two reasons. One, you are distracted (me, sometimes). By an upsetting meeting that happened before, or you are too caught up in your thoughts, or things are just amiss. In this case, the best option for you is to either meditate or journal. Find a way to empty your brain. There is no solution that’s simpler or more effective than that. The goal is to distance yourself from those thoughts. Now the second reason you procrastinate, which I feel is the most popular reason, is that you have a starting problem (me, 100% of the time). A starting problem is where you have a major, important task in front of you, but you feel scared, overwhelmed or simply unmotivated to start it. When this happens, I find that one of the following three, or a combination of all three helps me kick procrastination to the curb and get on with my life.
1. Set Deadlines
If I’m particularly resistant towards doing the research report that’s in front of me, I’ll give myself a time limit of 15, 20 or 30 minutes. So for the next, say, 15 minutes, I’ll do absolutely nothing but the task in front of me. No entertaining the random thoughts into my brain which tempt me to wander off on to Google like “I wonder what movies are coming out this month” which then causes me to come across a movie that seems interesting, looking up its trailer on YouTube, wondering what the lead actress in the film is doing now and before I know it, I’m watching a clip of Ricky Gervais demanding his Emmy back from Steve Carrell. I’ll tell myself “Okay, for the next 15 minutes, I’m not going to focus on anything but the task in front of me. After that 15 minutes is up, I can scroll through Instagram for 5 minutes.” This forcing myself to focus on giving a clear signal to my brain of when to start and stop focusing, and an “it’s just for 15 minutes” attitude helps me enter a workflow. Sooner or later, my brain catches on and when the 15 minutes is up, more often than not, I end up deciding to take the break after say, 30 minutes because I don’t want to lose the momentum. Because I know how difficult it is for me to start something. 30 minutes usually become 45 minutes, and then 60, which is the cut-off.
2. Ease into it
If I would very much rather watch an episode of The Office and starting the task in front of me seems too much to do or too overwhelming, I would let myself watch it for 5 minutes. When that 5 minute is up, I would let the video continue to play while I break the task in front of me into much, much, simpler portions. For example, if I have a research report which feels like such a chore to do, I break it down like this:
• Open a word document and save it with the project’s name
• Type out the headers for the research report: “Introduction, methodology, results, discussion, conclusion”
• Select all and change the font to Times New Roman, size to 12 and double space the document
• Start the first sentence for methodology – it’s always the easiest part of a research paper
This is not an exaggeration or a simple example of how I break down a paper, this was genuinely how I used to get started with a paper that seems too daunting. As you can see, these are things that you can do while you watch an episode of The Office because they don’t require you to think too much. After the first sentence under methodology, things start to get heavier and soon, the video becomes a distraction and depending on my mood, I either decrease the volume or stop it altogether. Even if you don’t have the “I rather be watching something else” tendency, I hope the breaking down of the task into much simpler tasks gives you some ideas.
3. Plan for it
Another reason that you tend to procrastinate is that there’s too many things to do, or you are not organized, or you didn’t plan how long each task on your to-do list will take. Not planning for how long a task would take is the biggest and the easiest pitfall of procrastination. Especially if you have only one task on your to-do list for your day, and you think “Well it’s just one task” and you spend all morning, and then all evening procrastinating while the “one” task actually requires 12 hours. To beat all that, I follow the rule of 3. Back in my 9-5, I would write up a task list for the next day at the end of every working day before I shut off my computer. The rule is very simple – write down and plan for 3, and only 3 major tasks that I expect to do when I come into work tomorrow. I would also add in how much time I expect to send on each of these tasks, and a 10-minute task list where I write down tasks that I anticipate for the next day that would take 10 minutes (e.g., emails, following up with study participants, etc.). Even if I actually have only one task, that’s actually mammoth in size such as a research paper, I would split it into 3 – say
1. Research and find supporting literature for the paper.
2. Write up paper.
3. Proofread paper.
This gives me components of the task that I can accomplish, and the one task is no longer one gigantic task that feels too much to do, it’s just 3 smaller tasks. As with any working world, it’s easy for this to fly out the window the minute something unexpected crops up and in my field, it almost always did. In this case, I would shuffle around my current task list to make sure that at the end of the day, I would have still only worked on 3 tasks. This is where the allocating of hours for tasks the day before comes in. Because when the unexpected task crops up, I know how much time that would take me, and I can move around the task or tasks that take a similar duration to the next day.
And that’s it! Those are the three very simple ways I try to avoid procrastination. I hope it gave you some ideas and if you have something that would be more of a surefire method than one of these, please do leave it in the comments below! Happy Monday, and I will see you again on Thursday!
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