The five essential steps towards a procrastination free life
By: Harry Saunders
Tags: Productivity, Procrastination, Self Improvement, Efficiency, Self Help

Probably at no point in history, procrastination was as prevalent as of today. Social media, our mobile phones, and other constant factors of distractions only started to appear a few centuries ago. If you combine this development with the fact that our current state of research suggests that the phenomenon of procrastination exists in all lifeforms (pigeons procrastinate just as much as humans do), it becomes apparent that reducing the amount of procrastination in your life can accelerate your achievements in your career or personal life by a staggering amount. To help you to achieve that development, I’ll show you 5 important tips which you can apply to your own life right after you finished reading this article.

1. Manage your environment

The basis of all productive work is a productive environment. To create this productive environment for yourself, you have to run through a checklist of different steps.

The first step consists of picking the right workplace. This decision is very individual and depends on many personal preferences like your sensitivity towards auditory stimuli or the sole degree of accessibility of public workplaces in your area. Popular choices are separated office rooms in your own home or areas like co-working spaces or libraries that are filled with other people being productive.

After you picked your preferred workplace it is time to remove everything that doesn’t belong onto or into the area around it. It is a key step to remove all sources of distraction out of your sphere of reach to avoid getting distracted and starting to procrastinate. Probably the most common driver for distraction is our smartphone. One of my favorite ways to avoid using my phones during my scheduled working times is to use the free app Forest, in which you can set a timer for how long you want to work distraction-free. During that period of time, a virtual tree will grow and block you from using your phone. Over time you will get used to keep your thoughts off your phone and possible messages and start to grow your own Forest.

2. Break down big projects

You probably know that feeling: you have a huge task in front of yourself and don’t even know where to start. For many people, this situation is a common trigger for a procrastination habit. Having a huge unstructured task in front of us can easily lead to the conclusion that it’s much easier to begin working on it later on than to start right away.

The best practice to avoid this procrastination trap is to follow this easy procedure when facing a big and on the first glance unconquerable project.

Divide your project into 5 subtasks that take a similar amount of time

After that, ask yourself the question: Does your first subtask take more than one hour?

Yes: Repeat the process with the first subtask

No: Get the first subtask done

These new subtasks have a small workload and are easy to tackle. This process will transform your huge project into a structured load of small work packages that don’t require an excessive amount of motivation to get done.

3. Structure your day

Another common source of procrastination is the lack of concrete tasks. If you regularly ask yourself what you should do right now during your workday, you should probably modify the way you structure your day.

Since you now have your projects split up into small and manageable tasks, it is important to define what times of the day should be used on what project. To transform this into reality you can either use digital tools like a calendar app or use handwritten approaches like the “Time blocking method” created by Cal Newport and explained in his amazing book Deep Work.

When you start planning your day from scratch be cautious about how much time you schedule for each of your tasks. Most humans tend to underestimate the duration needed to complete a certain task. This often leads to situations in which you can’t accomplish what you planned to do on a certain date which itself leads to frustration and procrastination. If your new to scheduling your day plan in DOUBLE of the time that you think a certain task takes. As you get used to using that technique your estimate of how long a certain task takes will get better and better and you will start to plan more accurately.

4. Reward yourself

Although the fact that humans have cognitively surpassed every other species on earth is obvious, many of the behavioral patterns of our ancestors can still be found in humans. One of the most basic neurological systems prevalent in almost all lifeforms is the one responsible for rewards. Positive stimuli such as water, food, or sexual contact will increase the amount of dopamine emitted in our brains and will reinforce the neurological circuits that lead to the reward.

This natural system can be used to your own advantage. As you structure your plan of the day, define rewards for single important tasks and a reward if you stick to your schedule and work procrastination free throughout the day. Completing these steps over and over again will reinforce that neurological pattern in your brain and therefore make it easier and easier to perform it every day.

5. Create habits

The most common reason for the question of why many people fail at repeatable tasks whilst others succeed is the existence of habits. If you want to get yourself to do an uncomfortable task at this moment you will have to trade in motivation and willpower in order to get yourself to do it. In this context willpower can be compared to a muscle that has a limited supply of energy and must rest after a certain threshold of stress has been reached. Therefore relying on your motivation and willpower in order to accomplish big projects is a fatal mistake.

The alternative to using motivation and willpower to perform certain tasks is to consolidate behavioral patterns as habits that are repeated over and over during a long period of time. With each repetition of the habit, less willpower has to be traded in, in order to perform the pattern linked to the habit. This will allow you to perform these tasks consistently and without any effort for an extended period of time. Many interesting tips on how to implement habits into your daily life can be found in the book Atomic Habits by James Clear.

Conclusion

Most attempts to proceed into a procrastination free life by tomorrow are doomed to fail. Getting rid of the nasty habit of procrastination requires time and commitment. Yet it is still possible to use a few simple tricks to start this transformation without a great amount of planning at the very moment. Therefore I urge you to try out these tips for yourself and discover how drastically they can change your own life.