28 Ways to Beat the Procrastination Demon
by Nick Cernis | 3 January 2008
Say it loud and proud: “2008 is the year I’ll stop putting things off and start organising my life!”
Great – you’ve made a commitment! Now read on for some hints to help you banish the procrastination demon for good this year.
Once you’re done, feel free to add your tips in the comments section.
How to Use This List
There’s a lot here, but don’t panic! Just try three habits a month and see how they work for you. Bookmark this page and come back to choose three more tips each month. Before 2009 you’ll have beaten the procrastination demon for good!
7 Top Tips
1. Keep a list – Carrying and updating a simple paper to-do list is the single best thing you can do to increase your productivity. If you’re not a natural list-writer, try it out for just a week: you’ll feel calm and in control knowing that you don’t have to carry everything in your head.
If you already have a list-writing system, that’s great! Keep up the habit and keep it up to date.
2. Set small goals and keep them – Goal-setting is an important part of avoiding procrastination and staying in control of your life. You don’t have to set big goals – just keep simple, attainable targets that you can accomplish each and every week.
Think of your goals as folders or headings. You might set a small goal to “decorate the kitchen”. Write that down at the top of your list and circle it. Next, jot down all the tasks underneath which help you get to your goal (”choose colours”, “prepare walls” etc). Once you’ve crossed off those tasks, you’ve just set and kept a goal – easy!
3. Train yourself to be productive – If you don’t naturally have much self-discipline, get distracted easily, or just think you could be more productive generally, get some productivity training done with this quick method:
Start by working solidly for 10 minutes, then taking a break or browsing the web for 3 minutes only. Repeat this cycle for a day and be firm with yourself. Your goal each day is to gradually build the 10 minute working time to 20, 30, 40 or more minutes without increasing your 3 minutes resting time. Try it – it worked for me!
4. Learn new habits – Becoming more productive is simply about replacing bad or inefficient habits with good ones. There are a whole bunch of great tips on this page, and I’ll be sharing more throughout the year.
For tips and ideas from others, don’t forget to check out the recommended and great blogs links in the right column further up this page.
5. Look for shortcuts – Once you’ve learned new habits, the next step is to optimise them as much as possible. I’m a self-confessed shortcut junkie; I look for ways of doing almost everything faster without sacrificing quality. Look for the shortcuts in your own life and enjoy all that extra free time.
6. Have a monthly check-up – Your car needs monthly checks to stay efficient. Guess what? So do you! Mark a day in your calendar when you’ll have a productivity check-up. You can make sure your lists are up to date, have a look at what habits worked for you this month, find three habits you’ll try next month, and reward yourself for the goals you made and kept.
7. Subscribe to PTO – Click here to subscribe to Put Things Off for free. You’ll get great features, video tips and reviews delivered to you throughout the year. You’ll probably learn a lot, and you’ll make me happy too! (I love a friendly audience.)
7 Communication Tips
1. Check email only twice a day – Imagine if your real-world post flooded through your letter box in a constant stream: all day, every day. It probably wouldn’t take long before you were barricading it shut, constructing a tin-foil hat and talking to the walls in frustration!
Treat your email the same way you treat your post. Your email software is just an electronic letterbox – only open it twice a day at the same time every day. 12pm and 4pm work best for me, but experiment for yourself. Don’t ever check it first thing; you’ll get distracted and lose the morning!
2. Use the right tools – A simple rule about communication tools: if the email you’re writing looks set to reach more than two paragraphs, pick up the phone and call instead.
3. Go retro and treat your broadband like dial-up – If you’re not using your internet connection for 5 minutes or more, physically unplug the machine or turn off the connection in your status bar. That way you’ll have to “dial-up” again by reconnecting whenever you need to use the web. Putting a small barrier like this in your way will help keep you focused on whatever you’re doing in the offline world.
4. Restrict Facebook/Instant Messaging – Social networking and chatting are great, but will both kill your productivity faster than you can say “Scrabulous”. Discipline yourself to use them at lunch time or after working hours only.
5. Have a feed reading day – You’re probably already subscribing to sites and news with RSS (if not – here’s a great video explanation about why you should). Keeping on top of that new content is worse than dealing with email! Set aside just one hour every week to properly scan and read anything that interests you.
6. Keep your inbox empty – If you’re not doing it already, learn to keep your email inbox empty. It should never contain anything you’ve already read. Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero system is the place to start if you’re new to this.
7. Take communication diets – Minimise interruptions during the day at whatever time you work best at. Switch off your phone and email to have a 3 hour communication diet each day – you’ll get more done and feel less stressed.
7 Office Tips
1. Friday is fileday – The best way to avoid putting off your filing is to get into the habit of doing it on the same day every week. For me, Friday is fileday. I try extra hard on Friday mornings to file any paper or email that’s hung around longer than it should. More often than not, it means I have a clear desk (and head!) on Monday morning.
2. Keep meetings short and fun – Meetings are the biggest procrastination demon lurking within most organisations. If you can get away with it, don’t have them at all. At the very least, limit them to just one day a month and fill that day with meetings. If that doesn’t work for you, try getting everyone you meet with to agree to a strict time limit. Then make it fun. Buy a 20 minute kitchen timer – when the bell rings, first one out the door gets a free iPod Shuffle! (Use chocolate bars or some other incentive after the first meeting, otherwise it could get expensive fast.)
3. Delegate it – Delegation is a tricky skill to master, but one that will see your productivity sky-rocket. Every time you receive a job, be it via email or in person, your first thought should be “Is there someone else who’d be better-placed to do this?” Don’t use it as an excuse to be work-shy, but if you’re genuinely not the best person for the job, politely ask someone who is if they can take it on.
4. Learn to love your job – Working in a job you enjoy will give you the single biggest productivity boost in the workplace. If you struggle to love your job, focus on one reason you’re doing it (The money? The people? A free canteen?) and use that to give you momentum.
5. If you can’t learn to love your job, consider getting a new one – If you’ve reached the point where you can’t stand your job, you’ll be amazed at how much more productive you can be if you find one you love.
Whatever you do, don’t quit without a plan; you should secure a new position (or have a business plan and 3 months savings if you’re leaving to work for yourself) before chucking your old one in.
6. Talk to your boss – If you can see where something in your organisation could be done more productively, talk to the people that run your company or department.
They will respond much better if you give them recommendations and solutions rather than a long list of problems. Set a calendar reminder to follow-up with them in a month to keep them on their toes. Yes, sometimes it’s a bit like talking to a brick wall, but it is possible to change a company for the better from the inside – stick at it and see.
If you’re lucky enough to be your own boss, you can skip this one – if you’re not already talking to yourself, starting now isn’t a good habit to try…
7. Forget faxing – Fax machines are wasteful, resource-hogging lumps that should be banned from every office. If you’re still using yours at work, do yourself a favour and take it to a recycling centre. If you desperately need to send a copy of a pre-printed page, buy one of the new scanners that produces a PDF on your desktop in one button press, then email the document instead.
7 Home Tips
1. Automate your home bills – Last year I set up our home bills to be paid automatically via bank transfer or direct debit. It’s made a phenomenal difference to the amount of free time I have a month. Think about the amount of time you waste paying each bill and multiply that by the number of bills you pay each month; the possible time saving for you could be huge. Don’t delay – automate today!
2. Shop for food online – More supermarkets are offering online shopping and home delivery of your groceries once a week. Try it – it will take a while to set up the first time, but the time saving you make in subsequent weeks will be worth it. (Since I’ve moved, I can get everything we need in our local village, so I choose to support the independent stores closest to me, but not everyone’s as lucky.)
3. Create your space – Avoid putting things off while working at home by creating a space you feel motivated in. It should contain the things that keep you happy (Music? Your computer? Photos of your family?) whilst being free from distractions (so move your games consoles or TV to a different room!). Spend just a little time creating a comfortable working environment and you’ll reap the benefits throughout the year.
4. Don’t become a hobby horse – How many hobbies do you have? Do they weigh you down? Consider trimming them back to free up time. Focus on becoming really good at a few things instead of average at many.
My family will tell you I’m the worst person in the world for dipping into interests and going through phases of fleeting fancy. But ever since I cut out the smaller ones and focussed on just three, I’ve had much more quality free time.
5. Eat enough, often enough
You need energy to get things done. If you don’t eat and drink enough often enough you’ll become lethargic and start putting things off. Since working from home I’ve found I have to be much more disciplined in eating regular meals; I don’t have a co-worker to go to lunch with any more. It’s much cheaper now, but there’s more chance of eating irregularly. I’m trying to curb this, and you should too!
6. Treasure friends and family– Your friends and family can give you a big motivational boost. Happy people are productive people, and most people are happiest with the ones they love. Make sure you spend some quality time with friends or family at least once a week. That means no ‘talking shop’ or multi-tasking – give them your undivided attention.
If you have a friend or partner like mine who puts up with your insane ideas and drivel for the rest of the week, you owe it to yourself and them to have a break!
7. Switch off – With all this talk of productivity, it might seem that we’re all destined to become robots! People aren’t machines. Don’t work yourself into the ground. The best thing my old boss taught me before I left was to balance work with play. Make sure you switch off from time-to-time.
Now it’s your turn
Do you have any top tips of your own? Add them in the comments below.
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9 comments so far:
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- Productivity for Beginners Part 3 | Put Things Off
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9 Jan 08
13:01
Nick
Hi Nick
Some interesting tips here; I’m relatively stress-free at work, so don’t feel drastic action is needed but I will be following your tips where I can. For example the empty inbox and phone-call-instead-of-long-email have been in use for a while - though from people’s expressions, the empty inbox is a rarity!
One tip I’d add is to take breaks at work - every UK employee is legally entitled to two 15-minute breaks a day ON TOP OF their lunch break, so I’d recommend people make full use of these breaks (which were actively encouraged at one company I used to work for) and take a breather from a hectic day. And of course, at lunch, don’t talk shop to anyone - again you need to switch off completely so you feel fresh when it’s nose back to the grindstone.
9 Jan 08
13:01
Nick Cernis
Thanks for adding your thoughts, Nick - your habits of taking entitled breaks and switching off at lunch time are excellent ones.
Having an empty email inbox is certainly a tough one to keep up with! I use a setup I call Inbox Heaven.
16 Jan 08
16:01
Lipton
I will be referring back to this list often, I procrastinate a lot, and am victim more often then naught to information overlord 0_o
Great post!
20 Jan 08
16:01
Paul Burani
I’d have said “keep a list” as my #1 too. But now I am surrounded by half completed lists and it’s driving me insane! I’d love to see a post to the effect of: “how to organize your life into lists without being irresponsible about your sanity.”
With that I’d also like to add that the 43 Folders podcast is one of the smartest productivity tools I’ve ever found.
20 Jan 08
16:01
Paul Burani
Also — Re: #4 and habits — I’ve read in several places that it takes 21 days of doing something for it to become a habit. Surely some sociologists out there have done research on this — does it still hold true in 2008?
22 Jan 08
09:01
Nick Cernis
Lipton: Glad it’s proved useful! Thanks for the kind words.
Paul: I’ll be posting more about lists and how to get the most of them, particularly paper-based ones, which I’m a big fan of.
Re: Your 21 days. I’m not a sociologist, but this sounds a bit sensational to me. (Why 21 and not 20 or 22, for example?) Forming a habit is not necessarily about waiting a certain number of days.
I would suggest that forming a habit is about three things only: repitition, repitition, repitition. The more you repeat an action, the more ingrained it will become and the more likely you are to adopt it as a habit. This is as true in martial arts, sport, music, theatre, blogging etc as it is in daily life.
5 Feb 08
20:02
Isaac
The nothing-in-the-inbox item is a really great idea. I am currently using my inbox as a to-do list, but I keep it to 5 emails max. The trouble is, I never have very recent emails in there *sigh*.
Another technique I use on my inbox, is to keep it in a Prism. There is an app from Mozilla (in alpha) that has stripped Firefox of its navigation buttons, feeds, everything. You can then stop yourself from keeping a tab open, and make sure that you only open gmail/hotmail etc. when you are going to check it all, and keep your inbox in Prison/Prism.
Sorry for the pun.
Isaac