The Swamp

I’m procrastinating by reading about procrastination hacks

September 23rd, 2007 at 7:10 pm (Life Lessons)

Here’s a great list of 20 procrastination hacks that are quite useful. The best are the top three:

1. Form a Do It Now habit. Procrastination, like many things, is simply a bad habit. By replacing it with a positive habit — the Do It Now (DIFN) habit — you will kick procrastination’s butt. This will require concentrated effort for 30 days, but after that, it should be on autopilot. I put up a sign on my computer that says “DO IT NOW” and every time I feel like procrastinating, I look at the sign and get to work. I’m working on this, and over the past few months I’ve been getting better at it.
2. Do Your MIT first. I have a rule that before I check my email or read my feeds, I have to do my Most Important Task first. I do it first thing in the morning, and then no matter what happens after that, I’ve done something very productive today. If you’ve been procrastinating on a very important task for some time, I suggest you do that first. Don’t allow yourself to do anything else until it’s done!
3. 10-minute rule. If a task seems overwhelming, tell yourself that you’re only going to do it for 10 minutes. There’s nothing intimidating about 10 minutes. And more often than not, you end up doing more than 10 minutes after that initial hurdle of getting started is overcome.

I can’t remember now where I read this, but my favourite hack is to pick an upcoming task with no firm deadline that’s not really important, and convince myself that it’s both important and urgent. Then I procrastinate on that task by doing other things on my to-do list like reading papers and cleaning my room. It sounds a lot like #20, but slightly modified.

My other two favourite tips are to have an organized boyfriend who guilts you into doing work, and setting up a Firefox add-on like PageAddict. If you can actually see how much time you’re wasting on the Internet (my procrastination method of choice) and have a program that forces you to stop, you’ll do it less.

One comment on #19, though:

Schedule it last-minute. Have an absolute deadline for a task that will take one hour? Schedule it so you don’t actually start on it until about an hour before deadline (well, give yourself a 30-minute cushion). Will a project take 2 days to complete? Schedule it 2 days before deadline. If you have absolutely no padded time in your schedule, you will have no choice but to get a move on.

This is the worst idea I have ever heard. Considering that a) most people who procrastinate are probably a little ADD, and b) most ADD people have serious problems gauging how long things take, scheduling something with a very narrow time cushion is begging, no, screaming for a disaster to occur.