How I deal with Procrastination
It’s 230PM and you start to feel drowsy, all the resolutions you made last night feel to drift away, and you slowly enter into pleasure mode.
A typical person here would either scroll through social media or do some socializing to feel a bit of pleasure for a while.
I replace that by playing games or eating some junk food.
What I understood was that the amount of time I spent on procrastination was astonishing. I used to start right after lunch which is typically around 2–230 till mid-evening around 6, and then I would start writing in my diary about how much time I wasted that day procrastinating. If the average person spends about 3hrs a day procrastinating(assuming they only procrastinate in the afternoons) that’s a whole 1095 hours a year. If I assume that you had a good night’s sleep of a whole 8 hours then you would be awake for 16 which would be 5840 hours a year so you’re spending 1095 hours out of 5840 every year procrastinating, which is an astonishing 18.75% of your total time (almost a fifth of your time) every year.
According to the book the war of art, there is an internal species called the resistance which creeps up on you every time you try to do something creative, entrepreneurial, artistic, etc.
This is really similar to procrastination which creeps up every afternoon rationalizing your pleasures over your productivity.
So let’s go over a couple of failed attempts
Take 1:
During this trial, I would leave all the menial tasks of the day to when I procrastinate and try to make my day more effective around the time that I function normally. Well, long story short this failed drastically. I ended up procrastinating all day long without doing anything.
Take 2:
I tried something different this time, whenever I felt lazy and like procrastinating I tried to do something fun and energizing so I would feel a bit more active and would continue working, later I realized that what I was doing was actually procrastinating but with a self-made setup.
The search:
As usual, I went on a hunt for answers on the high and mighty internet. Some suggestions I found were to simply focus on the feeling after completion to motivate yourself to start. This sounded strikingly similar to how you get the motivation to go to the gym, but one striking difference here is that the things that I wanted to do weren’t likely to give me any positive results after one session of doing it. It would possibly take a week, month, or even more to see any result which would motivate me.
After procrastinating for a while I tried out some self-reflection through writing. Now, this had some lasting effects and I would definitely recommend others to try it out as well. It helped me understand when I’m procrastinating and why but it didn’t exactly provide any solution to resolve it. I
It was finally time for some online lessons……………….
I’ve been going through a Coursera course called learning to learn.
I’d highly recommend you guys to check this course out as I’ve found many interesting perspectives that helped me out not only with procrastination but with learning in general.
https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn
For now, I’m going to talk about reward-based learning.
Reward-Based learning:
Remember when you used to help your parents out and then nag them for some cash, this is something similar to that. Basically, there’s a type of learning where you reward yourself after each learning or work session. What I tried before was the exact opposite of this I had fun and then tried to work but I guess work hard play hard holds true. So this time I tested myself on reward-based learning.
I set my timer to 40 minutes and focussed on getting some work done with the thought of having a reward at the end of it. For the first couple of minutes, I gotta say that I was only focussing on the reward but as time flew by I was extremely focussed on the task on hand and didn’t even realize when the alarm got off. I guess it’s true that initiation is the hardest step in any process.
A quote from The War Of Art by Steven Pressfield:
“There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.”
So you guys might be wondering what was the reward.
Well, I kept it simple this time, I was first thinking of something that would validate the amount of time I spent working, but the simple process of thinking of such a reward took a whole lot of time so I simply set it to a quick round to the supermarket to get a milkshake :).
The next method is quite a famous one
The Pomodoro:
The technique itself is relatively simple to grasp. It’s essentially a take on timers.
You got to set a timer for somewhere around 20–25 minutes and then work for that period of time. After working you got to take a small break for about 5 minutes and then continue with what you were going to do for another set of timed work.
And that’s it, the process itself is quite simple but is surprisingly effective. Now I didn’t want to buy a tomato timer for this experiment, so I did something similar with my phone's app. There’s a built-in app called zen mode in my phone which basically restricts all your apps and calls and shows you a calming ocean picture for a set amount of time so I set it to 20 minutes and started.
So since I knew that I only had to work for 25 minutes I focussed mainly on what I wanted to get done. I had to repeat this process 3 times to get around an hour of work done. Surprisingly this simple technique made me feel refreshed at the start of each session.
At first, I was a bit underwhelmed by the thought of what I could get done in a mere amount of 25 minutes, but to my shock I got quite a lot done. One thing that I’d have to say was that I wasn’t consistent with my break time it was a bit irregular the first break I took was around 15 minutes, and then the second one was about 10 minutes.
So the results…………….
I found that the Pomodoro technique worked quite well and I did get a lot of stuff done including this article. As a whole, since Pomodoro comes under reward-based learning, I’ll be trying out a couple of other techniques that follow the same principle.
I’ll try to share as much of my experience as possible here along with other types of articles as well. Of course, everything will be biased according to my experience but I hope you guys get something out of it.
For now happy procrastinating!!
