A Short Guide To Procrastination (which I eventually got around to writing).

Maybe this post is not for you. It might be that you are the type of person who was born motivated, with a digitised to-do list and the cut-throat efficiency to methodically churn your way through it.

Then again, maybe you are the type of person who just mooches through life with a vague plan of intent, some fuzzy hopes and dreams and goes to bed each night with the sour taste of disappointment.

Most likely you sit somewhere between the two extremes.

That said, almost all of us recognise the strange allure of procrastination – the total inability to do the one thing we should be doing, because we are too busy rearranging our wardrobes, staring in to the fridge or watching cute videos of baby elephants having a tantrum on You Tube. Tim Urban, who writes the very clever and wildly popular blog, Wait but Why, is a famous procrastinator. He blames the ‘Instant Gratification Monkey’ – the part of our brain that ‘lives entirely in the moment’, who ‘only cares about two things. Easy & Fun.’ The only thing the Instant Gratification Monkey is afraid of is the ‘Panic Monster’, but he only ever shows his face the night before, or the hour before a deadline is due, or an actual, real-life crisis of some kind is about to occur.

Which is a pretty stressful plan of attack.

So, the question is – How can we try and fast track the panic monster and get our sh*t done sooner, but with less stress?

Start Easy: According to the psychological phenomenon known as the Zeigarnik Effect, unfinished tasks are more likely to get stuck in your memory. The very action of just starting on a task keeps it front of mind. So, you might as well start with something easy – just write the first paragraph or jot down some initial ideas – that will be enough to trigger the niggling urge to complete the task for closures sake.

Start Small: Our brain freaks out when we make big changes to our lives and to our routines. So, for the chunkier stuff on your wish list (starting a business, taking up exercise, ending a relationship) take the smallest stop possible – register a domain name, jog for 5 minutes or talk it over with a friend. This way you bypass the part of the brain that is alerted when you are trying to make a change, the part that likes to get back to what is safe and familiar as soon as it can.  And by starting small, you focus on making the behaviour automatic which morphs it into a habit. And habits are just stuff we do without thinking, with no trickery required.

Self-Imposed Deadlines: Working from home offers untold distractions (the fridge, the laundry, my freshly made bed). So, in the absence of deadlines for all areas of my life, I have to make my own. I find the fastest way to achieve this is by time blocking – a productivity hack recommended by efficiency experts everywhere. It’s similar to the idea of mono-tasking that I discussed last week, but with the addition of time parameters. So, for example – 9-9.45am might be blocked out for email admin, then 10-12 for writing and so on throughout the day. Focusing on just that thing, for a prescribed period of time, means less thinking about a task and more getting on and doing it. Without it, I would most likely just snack and check emails on endless rotation.

Procrastination experts also recommend getting an ‘accountability partner’ (a person who encourages/guilt trips you into doing stuff) and ‘rewarding yourself for every task you complete’ (I work way too near to the fridge for this to work).

For those of you who react better to shock therapy, our friend Tim Urban came up with a life calendar, which is a visual look at your life in weeks -from your birth to age 90 – ‘Sometimes life seems really short, and other times it seems impossibly long. But this chart helps to emphasize that it’s most certainly finite. Those are your weeks and they’re all you’ve got.’