This is a guest post by one of the UK’s leading experts in digital distraction and digital detox, Frances Booth, author of The Distraction Trap: How to Focus in a Digital World, A Writer For All Seasons, and more productivity tips. Find out more about her here.
Research shows that many of us procrastinate. So if there’s something you’re avoiding, delaying or sidestepping, you’re far from the only one.
We’re skilled at procrastinating, sometimes so much so that we don’t even realize we’re doing it!
But things can only be put off for so long, and procrastination often saps our time and our energy. We also often want to stop procrastinating.
So here are some tricks to save time and angst when tackling procrastination.
Use whichever strategies resonate with you, or perhaps the ones you feel most resistance when reading:
1. Make a list of what you are putting off right now.
2. We invent all manner of other tasks that suddenly need to be done when we are putting something off. Recognize that this is happening if your diary is filling up with everything other than the thing you are putting off.
4. Are you delaying because taking the next step will mean you have to deal with confrontation, a difficult conversation or feeling uncomfortable? If so, find strategies to deal with these things.
5. Rather than thinking of the reasons why not, list the reasons why.
7. Putting off something scary? Try making it less formal by sitting on the floor, working in your slippers or writing in coloured pen, for example.
8. Give yourself an impossibly tight deadline. See how much you can get done in 20 minutes. Or decide to complete the whole project by the end of the day. When we have a tight deadline, we don’t have time to protest and procrastinate – we just have to get on with it.
9. Watch out for other people attempting to take your time just at the point you’d finally set aside time to get on with your task you’d been putting off. My related piece on Top 10 Ways To Say No And Save Timehas more tips on protecting your time.
10. We give a lot of energy to the things we don’t want to do by procrastinating. Instead, start focusing on the things you do want to do.
11. We often put off large tasks because they seem just too big to ever have time for. For example, you might have ambitions to write a book. Nowhere in your day-to-day schedule will you find the “spare” weeks and months needed for this in one chunk of time as a whole. Instead of putting it off (which could last years), break huge tasks down into manageable chunks. So, in the example above, find time to write a paragraph, or a page, then build from there.
12. Take the task you’ve been putting off, and do it as a draft. For example, quickly draft a tricky message, or scribble down key ideas for a presentation. Telling yourself this is only a draft frees up a lot of the hesitation. If it’s not for real we don’t have the same pressure we often feel when dealing with important or significant tasks. The next day, come back to the draft and send it, finalize it, publish it (or take the equivalent action to make it real).
13. There can be a huge sense of freedom and relief once we tackle what we have been putting off.
14. Instead of completing a task, get it 80% or 90% done. One reason we hesitate is that we want things to be perfect. The final bit of any task can take a disproportionately long time. So, once it’s at 80%, ask yourself if it could be finished, or finished within, for example, half an hour.
15. There are always easy tasks we can turn to to fill our time. We can spend minutes, hours, days, weeks or years on these, staying well within our comfort zone. We procrastinate when things are challenging. But when we do those trickier tasks, the ones that push us beyond our comfort zone, we might wish we hadn’t put off expanding our boundaries for so long.
Credit: North Charleston
A variation on a Banksy piece that has been doing the rounds on social media during the referendum campaign. Source unknown
I want to take a moment to be grateful today, for this day, my 39th birthday which I am spending in a beautiful yoga spa in the Costa Rican jungle and on a white sand beach at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
