Eliminating procrastination

I've had huge problems with procrastination. I was stuck in that cycle for over 6 months and I didn't accomplish much about anything during that time. Somehow I was overwhelmed with all the things I needed to get done that I would just avoid doing anything.

And that was precisely the problem. Actually I think that overwhelm is very important cause for procrastination.

With that said I started to explore ways to reduce this task overwhelm. I've found 3 strategies to do so:

1. Do one thing at the time (no multitasking)
2. Create smaller tasks (don't try to write the whole book today, but just 2 pages)
3. Working in action blocks

The first two are very good but the third one made all the difference.

Action blocks are just a period of time you decide to work in. Pomodoro technique is based on this - work for 25mins and rest for 5. But somehow I just could make pomodoro work for me. I would still avoid doing what I should do and even if I did manage to start working, I would lose my focus and give up.

With that said, I started experimenting with this strategy even more. And I discovered that we are all different (). 25mins might work for you but not for me.

I tried to lower the working time. I tried to use my own version of Pomodoro technique: 10mins of work and 2mins of rest.

It worked perfectly. I could easily motivate myself to work for 10 minutes and since 10 minutes is not a long period of time, I would not lose my focus.

So if you find yourself procrastinating or you find Pomodoro approach useless for you, try this one instead. To make things easier I made a timer for you so you just need to click "Start" and get going: Timer

However this doesn't work all the time. Sometimes when I need to write (or have to do something very demanding) but I simply can't do it, I would lower the bar even more.

Since I don't like to write, creating this post is very difficult for me and I had a hard time motivating myself to do this. Since 10/2 approach wouldn't work here, I made a 2/30 timer. I wrote for only 2 ******* minutes and then I would rest for 30 seconds and so on.

After only 10-20mins of doing this I would get the momentum and just continue with the 10/2 approach.

Action

1. Choose what you want to do
2. Make the timer as low as possible (if needed go with 1min/10sec for the start)
3. Hit start and get going

It's simple and it's effective! I hope that this post will help you and I hope that you will try this right now!

Thanks for your attention Warriors,
Nikola