Hello my readers. Up until now I’ve been talking and talking about many aspects of procrastination, and that’s fun and, well, an excellent way for you to procrastinate by reading about procrastination. Now I’m going to give the very first actionable tip to help you fight procrastination. As we’ve seen before there are many types of procrastinators and different reasons for procrastinating, so we’ll need a set of tools to be effective and efficient. One of the reasons for procrastination is facing distractions. We all have now machines around us that are fighting for our attention, and on top of that we install more apps to let them do this task better. We’ve got social media, games on top of social media, video sites, music sites, blogs like this one but less useful. Just to see how successful this companies are ate getting our attention I’ll give you some information. As of the moment of this writing, the market value of Facebook is 274 billion dollars, that of General Electric is 283 billion dollars, and that of General Motors… 45.5 billion dollars. Can you see that? Distraction is big big business. Now, we all love our Facebook, I’m not saying you should go cold turkey, uninstall the apps and curse your smartphone or computer, that would only be necessary on the most extreme cases. But what I’m going to propose is a two step strategy, two phases that will let you do your work and have fun too. The first step is to eliminate those distractions, and by that I mean all the literal bells and whistles that our apps have turned on by default. They all shout for our attention “Hey, look, someone commented on that post about a lost puppy your friend put up this morning, check it out!” or the more common “You’ve got mail”. Most phones have the “do not disturb” function or at least the one that lets you turn the ringers off. If you’re only on your computer you can shut your email down, close your browser and even turn your speakers off to quiet it down. Do you need more privacy? Shut your door, let the calls go to voicemail, that’s what it’s there for, and do your work.
We are ready then to work, and that’s awesome. We’ve eliminated distractions and we are prepared, pumped up because we will be able to work. We feel great and maybe we might even have won a little reward, maybe we can get a cup of coffee and… Stop, that’s procrastination too. Here’s where the second part comes in, and it’s the most important. We can see what happened before. We feel happy because we’ve accomplished a prepping task and here comes the pleasure seeking part of our brains claiming it’s reward. We are recognizing some patterns in our behavior. We can use them as triggers to actively change our responses. By first recognizing this pattern we can prepare a different response to it, so we must first do that, recognize them. Some are very easy to spot, they come in the form of “There’s a lot of time left, I’ll do this later” trigger, our response has to change from “yes, drop it” to “you’re trying to get out from doing this, let’s start now” We can frame this in IF THEN statements and be ready for them easily, I’ll give some examples next.
- IF I catch myself saying “there’s lots of time, maybe later” THEN I’ll tell myself “Maybe, but you can start now so do it now”
- IF I catch myself saying “I don’t feel like doing this now” THEN I’ll tell myself “You won’t feel like doing it later either, it’s a horrible task, let’s get it over with ASAP”
- IF I catch myself saying “I need to prepare more” AND I know for a fact that I can’t be more prepared THEN I’ll tell myself “You’re as ready as you’ll ever be, buckle up because we’re doing this”
This mechanical responses can seem simple and silly, but that’s the beauty of it, they work. Try them, write them down on a notebook and check them out, grow your list. You can even write them down on index cards and carry them around with you, like little affirmations this is the software you’re going to use in your head to help you respond to this procrastinating inciting triggers.
If you liked this tips I’d really love to read your comments, you can share with us some of your triggers and responses, we can all learn from each other, so please post some here.
Well, then complete it in that much time, after which you’re not allowed to go back to the task under some sort of self imposed penalty. You need to penalize yourself as if you were going over the deadline because if you are lenient you won’t take this seriously. Penalties will only be necessary at first don’t you worry, because you’ll have to limit the time you spend on everything, and I mean EVERYTHING. And here’s my best advice of the day for you. In order to be able to limit the time you set for your activities you’ll first have to know what your activities are, what tasks need be done and which are routine activities you already have or want to adopt. What? You say it seems I’m going to talk about a schedule? Well, you’re right. For the worst procrastinators of us a detailed schedule will be necessary if we want to use our times the best we can. I for one have a terrible memory and if I don’t allocate the hours of the day for my different tasks and habits I might skip something. If you’re comfortable with having it all in your head, you don’t drop any ball, and feel good freestyling it, by all means, be my guest, but if you feel anxious, lose focus and track of time, then you should schedule everything. So, that’s it, Parkinson’s Law can make us lazy crazy and give us the impression of accomplishment when we really wasted lots of time if we ignore it’s existence. When we tame it, we can use it to our advantage and let it work for us, just like we do with the law of gravity. Another tool for your tool belt.
Now, let me ask you, if that’s the case, why isn’t the present self that awesome? It should be, after all, it’s the future self of our past self, is it no? And that past self made all of the mostly same new year resolutions the present self is making and nothing happened, most of the time. So, what’s going on? Well, we like lying to ourselves. We like making excuses. We love rationalizing irrational behavior. We tell ourselves “I’ll feel more like it tomorrow” perfectly knowing we are not going to feel more like it tomorrow, well, maybe the next day then. We do all of this because we procrastinate. Yes, it is my leitmotif if you had been distracted and hadn’t noticed. We procrastinate and make reasons why we do so. In previous posts we’ve talked a little about this. We procrastinate because we are afraid, because we don’t feel like it, because we think we better under pressure, for many reasons, most of them because we think we’ll feel like it later. In some cases this is true. We feel more like working on an assignment rather than partying, watching TV or whatever other activity on the night before we have to turn it in than on the night it was given, this is true. The thing is that not all of the things we procrastinate on are, let’s say it this way, deliverables. We procrastinate also on changing for the better. On making changes that are going to transform us on better people, healthier, wealthier, happier. Here’s the apparent paradox. We act as if we won’t change and as if we are going to change at the same time. The paradox goes away when we realize that we are going to change in a way that, if we don’t do the work, is going to make us worse than we were before, and that if we don’t want that we need to work on it today to prevent this natural decay. So, what will you do, today, to be that awesome future self we all dream about?
What does it have to do with focus and visualization? Mindfulness is a tool for us to use, a way on which to travel to gain better focus and be better at visualizing. By practicing mindfulness we learn how to be in the moment by stepping in front of our wandering minds and not letting those pesky meandering thoughts catch our attention. Current Internet mythology establishes our thoughts at about 50,000 to 70,000 different ones per day, most would have to come and go and come back some more. Mindfulness trains by constant repetition, and if we are attentive enough we could call it deliberate practice, to keep those thoughts at bay and get a genuine sense of calm, but also it trains us to swiftly bring our focus back when distracted and that’s the most important part. By using this ability we can bring our focus back when we get distracted from our tasks or from our visualizing. Visualization is a difficult exercise because we can be thrown to every other direction by any distinct thought, but realizing this and getting back on track, by bringing the focus back to our visualization, we’ll be able to set our paths to our goals and have a safe journey.