People sometimes get frustrated and upset with their procrastinating habits, and they turn to the big ol' Internet for tips and tricks on how to stop procrastinating. For me there seems to be only one thing that actually works, but first let's see what procrastination is and how the Internet suggests to combat it.
procrastinationNOUN; [prə(ʊ)ˌkrastɪˈneɪʃ(ə)n]the action of delaying or postponing something
SYNONYMS:dithering · delaying tactics · dilatoriness · stalling · temporizing · hesitation
What the Internet suggests
One of the first tips on how to stop procrastinating I can find is to break your work into little steps. Make your big work into several smaller work if you will. While this is a pretty solid advice and it should work, it doesn't work for me. In between those smaller works I naturally take a break and that break turns back into procrastination, so what I am left with is the start of whatever I was supposed to be doing and... That's it.
The second advice is to change your environment. That could help even more, but I don't always have the option to change my environment. Unless I move from the bedroom to the kitchen but that doesn't work anyway. I have a small kitchen that other people use throughout the day so besides inconveniencing my housemates it would be difficult to focus on the task at hand. So no, good advice, but not always possible.
Another good advice is creating a list of things you have to do, a deadline on when you must have those things completed. The problem with this one is that I make the list, I set the deadlines so I can easily break them with no consequence. What am I going to do to myself? Be upset? Disappointed? Ha! I have a long history of those, it doesn't work anymore.
The lists follow with things like getting someone involved to motivate you, which would be great, but it's incredibly hard to find someone to motivate you in this day and age when people have all kinds of stuff on their plate and don't need another, no matter how simple it might be. I also don't have a lot of friends so I don't have who to turn to for this.
Another tip is to tell people about your plans. Out of all of them this is the one that backfires the most. We, people in general, tend to have a feeling of satisfaction, of false completion when telling others about what we're about to do. It makes us feel as if we already did part of the job when in reality we did jack shit. As a result we feel better about ourselves, but don't actually do anything. I would not recommend this one.
What I found works best for me
So now that I saw some of the tricks on the list and tried some of them in the past with no result, I'm left with finding a solution myself. We all do things differently, so obviously this won't work for everyone like it works for me, but what I found to actually help me stop procrastinating is to eliminate all procrastinating materials. This includes social media, websites I frequent, video sharing platform etc etc. My main procrastination buddies are Reddit and YouTube. If I eliminate those two I have no choice but to work on whatever I have to get done.
This is where I am at right now. Ignoring procrastination enablers. Even when I'm done with all my tasks, I continue giving them the cold shoulder a while longer. If I'm done with everything instead of jumping right on the 'do nothing' train I read a few pages of a book. I have some on my phone that just can't wait to be read and I really want to read them too.
Of course, this lasts for a limited period. At some point I'm going to start spending more and more time on various platforms, ignoring my tasks, then I'm going to get all ugh, I have to do something, then I'm going to be productive for a while, and then back from the top. I guess when we don't really have a lot going on we do create our own little inconveniences.
No comments:
Post a Comment