How I Overcame Procrastination With a Few Simple Questions
Procrastination
It’s productivity’s worst enemy.
Widely cited as one of the biggest working from home challenges, it chips away at our working day and can leave us feeling self-abasing and frustrated.
It can make us feel like we’ve wasted our whole day and make those work tasks seem never-ending because we can just never focus our minds to finish them.
A simple task becomes a mountain and that mountain grows and grows and grows every time we sit down and try scaling it.
It’s the embodiment of putting things off. “I’ll do it after this YouTube vid”, slides into “I’ll do it after lunch”, but then after lunch turns into late afternoon, and then before you know it it becomes “I’ll do it tomorrow“. And the worst thing? You may have already said that yesterday too. Maybe even the day before that!
Have you been putting it off? If procrastination is productivity’s worst enemy and you are reading this article then is it also your worst enemy? Because it can definitely be mine.
It’s not just avoidance, it is the undercurrent of guilt we feel when we procrastinate, that makes the situation all the more frustrating.
Case in point: This article. It took me ages to be able to put my thoughts down on paper. I kept saying I’ll do it later. I kept thinking of excuses to do something else when I should of been doing this!
A little bit about myself too, I actually come from a psychological background. I have two degrees in psychology. None of this article constitutes medical advice of course as it’s purely informational, but I already knew everything that I have written down below. But I still put it off! I knew what I had to do and that was snap myself out of my writing lull and just put it down.
But it isn’t just as simple as that. Procrastination eats away at you.
So how did I beat it? Well, I actualised the following steps. I’m going to show you what worked for me.
Tackling what makes us procrastinate
The first step is to dig deeper: What is the reason we are doing precisely what we shouldn’t be doing? What exactly are we avoiding? Is it something unpleasant? Is it a mountain of paperwork? A mammoth task. Does it make us anxious or uncomfortable? Is it perfectionism?
Is it all the above?
Well, we are the most productive when we are in the “flow state”.
We spend the most attention when we are slightly challenged, and slightly anxious. This is the “flow state”.
Think of it like a video game (apt I know speaking about video games when they are the main distraction for most), but you get the most enjoyment out of a game when you are slightly challenged and slightly anxious. You don’t want a game to be too easy otherwise it’s boring. You want to feel the challenge. You want to feel the anxiousness that everything is going alright at the moment but round the corner, something might happen. It keeps you engaged. It keeps you playing.
Don’t get me wrong there are obviously some games that are very hard and that’s why some people also enjoy those games too but for the average person we want to feel like we are in the flow state: A challenge, but not too challenging. Anxiousness, but not too anxious.
Therefore going back to the above and “Tackling what makes us procrastinate“. The likely reason why you are procrastinating on the work boils down to two things:
Either the challenge you face is too hard. You feel too challenged and therefore you feel too anxious.
Or it’s too boring. And you feel no challenge.
We need to overcome this.
Breaking the task down and overcome the boredom
For example, in my current role as a mental health professional, I see 25 clients. The role is demanding in terms of paperwork; each student has a timesheet that must be filled in word, each folder containing an email to make sure the session had taken place.
I noticed that as each semester began and ended, I always found myself in an embarrassing, last-minute scramble to complete these.
Initially, my boredom led to avoidance, which leads to the task being overwhelming. I turned a boring easy task into a task too challenging to complete on time. The anxiousness level, therefore, rocketed because I was avoiding the simple easy tasks until they all started to add up to a big larger problem.
Therefore having recognised the budding inertia I asked myself these questions to overcome my procrastination:
What is stopping me from doing it?
- The sheer size of the task? Well, break it down. The challenging aspect will hopefully then become easier as the smaller aspects of the chalenge become ticked off one by one
- Or was it too boring? How can do you therefore make it more interesting? Bring snacks? Listen to music? Entice yourself with a reward afterwards? Hopefully then the boredom reduces.
What are the incentives?
- How great will you feel having done the task? What will be the positive outcomes: list them.
What are the negative consequences of you not doing it?
- Having my personal time spoilt, that lingering feeling of guilt that can ruin any Sunday. Do you therefore sacrifice the time now to save your weekend and make it work free as it should be?
Is there anyone you could collaborate with/or be accountable to?
- Can someone else help? A colleague? A friend? A partner?
And going back to my work and my mountainous timesheet task, what I did was visualise all of the above and I took out a sheet of paper and broke the task down:
Then, to make the task more interesting, I poured myself a coffee, lined up my favourite snack (peanuts) and played my favourite productivity inducing playlist.
Making just these small changes to our environments can massively aid our productivity. It is about making the task as palatable as possible. It’s about trying to make it fun in some way. If the work is rubbish, at least the music is cool or the peanuts are nice!
Through this I was able to overcome my task by breaking it down and created these microtasks to conquer the whole.
And how do I usually break big tasks down? I personally flit between software, todoist, and a list. Or sometimes, like on this occasion, I just used a simple plain piece of paper and a pen. Then I followed the steps above I was able to overcome my procrastination. Because after all:
The pen and paper is mightier than the sword.
Josh
