Procrastination. As much as we love to kick our feet up in the air and avoid getting any work done, sometime or other you'll feel that that was a total waste of time. Delaying or postponing these tasks you know you should get done is really easy nowadays too where there's so many other things you can and would rather do. However, procrastination is nothing new and all of us have just fallen victim. Greek philosophers even had a word for it, "Akrasia" meaning "The state of acting against one's better judgement". Better judgement means choosing to do something you know will be of value to you in the long term over a mindless quick task for a present reward.
Now let's see the tips and tricks i've come across to avoid procrastinating to some extent and get more things done.
The 2 minute rule
This is a rule mentioned in David Allens book "Getting things done" where he says, if a task takes less than 2 minutes to do, you should just do it without thinking twice. If its washing a bowl or rearranging your sock drawer, if it takes less than 2 minutes just doing it can clear a lot of things off your plate. Then your mind can be at ease knowing you did the dishes.
The 5 minute rule
This second rule speaks to the more heavy tasks and this requires tricking your brain. A lot of research around procrastination shows that the difficulty is not in continuing any task but a lot of it is in starting it. The term for this is "Resistance". This resistance is something that tries to keep things the way they are avoiding creativity, action or progress. Basically it's a tiny devil who doesn't want to change the way things are.
The 5 minute rule is simply convincing yourself that you're only going to do the thing for 5 minutes. And after that you can stop. This impulse helps you to get started and once you have push the ball over the hill it'll keep rolling downhill.
Define your goals
Having a set goal for a certain task can improve your productivity. If you can actively think about it and decide for yourself what your final goal is, you'll be more likely to get up and get it over with and you'll be more focused on a possible completion. When you know you can finish it, you let fewer room for distraction.
I procrastinated from writing this blog post for days and if you're anything like me i hope this helps you be more productive.
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