Effective Ways to Procrastinate
Published: 2023-04-23 00:03:05

Have you ever found yourself coding and thought, "I'm just being too efficient right now"? Well, you're in luck. Today I'll be covering some of my favorite ways to procrastinate.

## Resources
First I'll cover some of my favorite resources for procrastinating, starting with Reddit. 
Next time you find yourself getting too much work done, go ahead and jump on over to reddit.com. You'll find all kinds of wonderfully useless subreddits that cater to all tastes. I will warn you, however, that some subreddits can actually provide some useful information. It will be up to you to avoid these.

A recent addition to list of time-wasting resources (that I'm very excited to share with you), is https://whackamole.onrender.com/highscores. This is an excellent time-wasting game that was made by a coding friend of mine, Nick. I can't tell you how much time I've spent on this game instead of working on important projects.
Another great resource for dawdling is Youtube. I'd suggest finding a mildly interesting video and really let Youtube's algorithm take over from there.

My final resource for delaying important tasks is Quora. Quora is a tremendous resource for scrolling through user-asked and answered questions. The really great thing about Quora is that you'll often feel like you're learning while you're using it, but realize later that you didn't retain any of the information.

## Strategies
Now that I've provided some resources, let's go over a few of my favorite strategies for really supercharging your procrastination. 
First, you're going to want to start with your schedule. Go ahead and divide your schedule up into 15 minute increments. At first this might seem ineffective, that you'll allow yourself a reasonable 15 minutes to take a break and then get back to work. The genius here, however, it that you can simply blow past that 15 minute mark by only a minute or so and think to yourself, "well, I might as well go for another 15 minutes." You can utilize this strategy for quite a while until the shame forces you back to work.
In the same vein, you can divide your day up more effectively to lend itself to lag. Tell yourself you just need to warm up in the morning, then after lunch you can tell yourself you need a bit longer to get back in the groove. Before you know it, you'll realize it's already evening-time and you're both too tired too continue and you've also gotten absolutely nothing done all day.

Next, you're going to want to bring your phone into the mix. One thing I've found terrible for my procrastination is divvying up my workspaces; putting time-wasting activities in their own workspace. My work efficiency was unfortunately greatly increased as a result. A great workaround was to incorporate my phone. Now, instead of needing to switch to my time-wasting workspace, I can just pull out my phone and scroll through one of the resources listed above. The great thing about this trick is that sometimes you genuinely do need to access your phone, such as using a password manager. This makes it quite easy to transfer from legitimate work to work postponement.
My final strategy for effectively getting little done is to delve into some web-search rabbit-holes. Run across some code you don't fully understand or a frustrating bug? At this point I would follow the conventional wisdom to Google it. You may be tempted to simply find your answer and move on, but this isn't really the best way. The key here is to really allow yourself to get caught up in ancillary links and information that you don't really need. As with Quora, I find this method particularly effective in that I often find myself feeling like I'm learning useful information but come to find it's all been for naught and that I don't actually remember any of it. 

## Final Thoughts
These are just a few of my favorite procrastination hacks. Feel free to reach out if you'd like some more tips on how to successfully put off doing real work. And, as always, feel free to leave feedback in comments. I'm always on the lookout for more useful strategies for not getting anything done.