A Hidden Trick to Avoiding Procrastination
Recently I was asked to contribute to an article on Today.com. Very exciting overall! But especially so because the author used one of my favorite procrastination avoiding tricks. Here’s the deal. Do you find that you have a revolving To-Do list that never quite goes down? Or that at the end of your week, you look back and realize you’ve done a lot but it didn’t feel that way along the way. What if you could enjoy a sense of accomplishment every day?
This trick is in two parts:
- Schedule your To Do’s: Reserving time for things makes them harder to avoid (when they are not fun) and creates pleasurable anticipation when they are fun. It also makes it easy to see, and give yourself credit for, what you’ve done.
- Schedule fun and recovery time: Instead of beating yourself up for watching cat videos and scrolling on Facebook, get curious about why you’re doing it. Chances are you’ve scheduled work tasks but not: lunch, a quick water cooler break (for extroverts), alone time between meetings (for introverts), exercise, making breakfast and prepping the kids for school.
There’s a lot you do automatically that takes a lot of your day. You also need time to take care of yourself in spurts throughout each day. Making sure to account for those, and scheduling it all, leaves you feeling like you are in front of the 8-ball, and that provides more energy, and more resolve to be productive.