The more boring, frustrating, difficult, meaningless, ambiguous, and unstructured a task is, the more likely you are to procrastinate with it
Why you procrastinate
- According to Pychyl, procrastination is fundamentally an emotional reaction to what you have to do
- The more aversive a task is to you, the more you will resist it
- Tasks that are aversive tend to be boring, frustrating, or difficult
- Chronic procrastinators want to eliminate negative mood or emotions now, so they give in to the impulse to put off the task
Just get started
- Once you start a task, it is rarely as bad as we think
- In fact, once you get started on something, your “attributions of the task change”, and what you think about yourself changes, too.
- When you find yourself thinking things like ‘I’ll feel more like doing this tomorrow,’ let that be a flag or signal or stimulus to indicate that you are about to needlessly delay the task, and let it also be the stimulus to just get started.
Become better friends with future-you
- Create a future memory
- All it takes to delay gratification is to imagine your future.
- Imagine your future self
- The more vivid the future feels, the better.
- Send an email to your future-self
- Explain how your actions will make your current self better
Form “implementation intentions”
- Think about when, where, and how you’re going to do them
- Implementation intentions are a fancy way of saying that you should make your tasks more concrete
- Move from broad goal intentions to specific implementation intentions
- A cognitive technique where you do some thinking around: “What am I gonna do when?”
Limit how much time you spend on something
- This makes the task more fun, more structured, and less frustrating and difficult because you’ll always be able to see an end in sight.
- There are huge productivity benefits to the idea as well. You force yourself to exert more energy over less time to get it done.
Use procrastination as a sign you should seek out more meaningful work
- In every job there are going to tasks you find aversive.
- If you constantly find yourself procrastinating because your work is aversive, there may be other jobs that are more aligned to your passions, that you will be much more motivated and productive in.
Be kind to yourself
- Negative self-talk comes out in spades when you procrastinate
- 80% of the thoughts you say to yourself in your head are negative
- Make up a story about why you’re not doing something to cover up your procrastination
List the costs of procrastinating
- Since procrastination is very much an emotional reaction to what you feel you have to do, activating the rational part of your brain to identify the costs is a great strategy to get unstuck
- Make a list of the tasks you are procrastinated on, and then “ext to each of these tasks or goals, note how your procrastination has affected you in terms of things such as your happiness, stress, health, finances, relationships, and so on.”
Flip a task’s characteristics to make it less aversive
- Tasks that are aversive are usually a combination of boring, frustrating, difficult, meaningless, ambiguous, and unstructured
- By breaking down exactly which attributes an aversive task has, you can take those qualities and turn them around to make the task more appealing to you
Know the ways your brain responds to “cognitive dissonance”
When you realize that you should be doing something but that you aren’t, you can respond in one of several ways
- Distracting yourself
- Forgetting what you have to do
- Downplaying the importance of the task
- Giving yourself affirmations
- Denying yourself responsibility to do the task
Disconnect from the Internet when you have to get something done
- 47% of people’s time online is spent procrastinating
- There is little doubt that our best tools for productivity-computer technologies-are potentially also one of our greatest time wasters.
- To stay really connected to our goal pursuit, we need to disconnect from potential distractions like social-networking tools.
