I’m a terrible procrastinator and I want to do something about it. What are your best tips for making sure you don’t waste time?[sup]1[/sup]
[sup]1.[/sup] [sub]Posting about procrastination is most assuredly not a form of procrastination :)[/sub]
As soon as I’ve played a bit more of fallout 4, I’ll come back with some sound advice.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
Come back tomorrow.
You want tips on how to to become a really GOOD procrastinator?
It takes years of assiduous practice and self-discipline to become a Master Procrastinator, but with relentless hard work, you can do it! I know.
One of the core fundamentals of the True Procrastinator is realizing that 90% of the shit we fill our waking time with doesn’t really need to be done in any hurry and can be put off, often indefinitely, with no undesired consequences at all. And a lot of that stuff, one may find, doesn’t really need to be done at all.
Viewed this way, procrastination is really just a highly efficient way to run one’s life, even though the Protestant work-ethic moralists have brainwashed most of us into believing exactly the opposite.
As your procrastination skills increase towards infinity, your life-efficiency increases towards 100%, even as the amount of activity you actually accomplish approaches zero. In the ultimate case, you can become totally 100% efficient in your life while being totally comatose. This is the Master Procrastinator’s ultimate Nirvana.
I’m one of those horrible procrastinators and to me this is the worst part: if It’s Monday morning and I know I need to have something done by Friday morning Ill keep telling myself each day that I’ll do it or get started when I know damn well that I’ll put it off till Thursday night or Friday morning so I’ll sit there and rack my brain with guilt and stress as each day passes and it ruins the whole week for me, I should have just relaxed and enjoyed all those days till crunch time cause I knew deep down I wasn’t going to do get the thing done till the last minute anyway.
Serious answer: make lists.
Keep an events calendar, and obey it, doggone it. Show up on time – or a little early – for appointments.
Break tasks down into sub-tasks, and document them. Make checklists and outlines. Make a grocery list when you go shopping, instead of going randomly up and down the aisles picking and choosing. Learn to think about efficiency.
Also, don’t stress over it. Feelings of guilt only make things worse, never better. If you intended to mow the lawn and do the laundry, and only got partway through the lawn…well, that’s better than nothing. You now have a good assessment of what you can accomplish in a day.
Pretend like it’s all work at the office, and you’re getting paid for it. Think in terms of output and accomplishment.
Also, make sure your time-budgets have LOTS of “slop time” for unexpected snags. I knew a guy who tried to schedule everything to the exact minute. Naturally, his plans collapsed like a house or cards, because someone will need to stop for gas, and someone else will have forgotten their umbrella, and someone else wants to stop at McDonalds, and someone else thought the party was on Thursday.
Concur with what Trinopus said, especially lists.
Also, I find it useful to ask myself “it must be done, so why not now?” (I didn’t invent this - I think I might have picked it up from Larry Niven). Sometimes the answer to the “why not now?” question is quite a genuine reason not to start, but I find this a useful mental tool just to force the evaluation.
Set yourself goals, both short and long term.
Make them achievable and desirable.
For example one of my long term goals was to own a house. (It took decades, but I got there. 
)
My short term goals have included:
- organising a trip for a bunch of friends
- tidying my house (one room at a time!)
- writing a fun article for my school magazine
- Read “The Screwtape Letters” by C.S. Lewis. It’s about a demon and how he quietly and relentlessly destroys this man’s soul. Advice he gives to his nephew on how best to approach the task:
It always helps me to picture him rubbing his long green fingers together and chuckling as I fall for the latest click-bait and then spend three precious minutes waiting for the “23 Photos that will Give You Arachnophobia” to download. After reading that, I began to ask myself “Am I really enjoying this?” The answer is often “no.”
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Make all deadlines one day before they are really due. Or one hour, depending upon the time scale.
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At the end of the day, write down everything you worried about getting done. You will be astounded at the number of hours you have allowed to be ruined when you could have been accomplishing the task. I have caught myself wrecking an entire week, rather than simply doing a 20 minute task.
Then take your list and add one thing to each item that you can do first thing in the morning. No coffee, no food, no computer except as it directly pertains to that task - one thing you can do to move that task forward before you do anything else. Try to keep these down to 1-2 minutes each. Just get that forward momentum going before the distractions get a chance at you.
- Do the jobs you hate most first. Get it over and done with. No matter what else you need to do, prioritize your time by getting rid of the worst tasks first. Think of them like a garbage bag that is dripping gook - get it out of the house so it doesn’t drip all over everything else.
Something I believe can give any of us hope for any behavior we want to change. We get a chemical reward when we do something right. When we do it enough times to reinforce it it will start to become more of a good habit.
I started off by making sure my garage and shop lights were turned off before I settled down for the evenings. A very small act that took about 30 seconds but something that left me feeling bad many times because I didn’t do it. My next step was to simply start cleaning up after myself as a part of any job. I had to force myself.,
The lists and other things mentioned above also are good ideas. Start off with a 1 week commitment and see how it goes.