In this episode we are going to talk about procrastination, why it is a problem and how you can overcome it in your work life. If you have a habit of putting off the important for later and you find it hard to focus and get stuff done in a timely fashion then this is going to help you. 

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Now I am going to admit, I am a recovering procrastinator. Procrastination was a big problem throughout my college life, I always put off important tasks until the very last minute. One time when I was studying for my final exams, I would wander around the college, which was a live-in situation, I would look for people to go to the shops with me just so I did not have to study. So everybody else except I was studying, They would tell me, “You need to go and study,” but I did not want to study, I wanted to go to the shops. 

So I’d find some hapless soul that I could convince to go to the shops and they would end up delaying their study for my sake, and that made me feel better about my procrastination. The problem was, that my work didn’t go away. You have probably found yourself in that situation. You put off things that you know are important until the very last minute and you put yourself under tremendous stress and pressure to get it done quickly at the last minute and this often causes real problems.  

Research has shown that if you are a procrastinator and tend to do things at the last minute, while you may get things done, the quality of your work is greatly affected. If you want to become a more effective operator in whatever field you are working in, whether I am talking to teachers or leaders you need to learn how to manage procrastination so that it doesn’t affect the quality of your output or product. 

Why do we Procrastinate ?

First of all, let’s think about why we procrastinate ? What is it about procrastination that even makes it a thing?

Well alot of it has got to do with the way your brain functions, your brain has two parts to it, the learning part and the automation part. That is the simplest way I can explain it, if you want to understand this more, read a book called “Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow.” It gives a really good explanation; but basically when your brain is learning something it has one function where it is processing information.

It is hard work for your brain to learn new topics and do something that you don’t do out of habit or in a routine. Your brain is always looking for shortcuts and opportunities to make things speed up or automate. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this post on Facebook. They write out a whole sentence and take all the vowels out of the words and there are only consonants left, but you can still read the sentence. Well, that is your brain taking shortcuts with reading, your brain has already learned that there’s a whole bunch of words that it can recognize even if there are no vowels.

It will automatically process those words to help you read and think faster, but before you get to that point, you actually have to learn the words. You have to do the hard work of memorization and that’s what your brain doesn’t like to do. Your brain doesn’t like to do the hard work of learning and that’s one of the reasons why we tend to procrastinate. 

When we come up against a task, a topic or an activity that we know is not natural or is going to take some effort, our brain’s natural protection against stress is to say “Let’s do this later.” Stress causes a great deal of pain to your brain, the stress hormone cortisol is designed to help you get out of dangerous situations but it’s also quite toxic to your body. So your brain tries to avoid stressful situations by procrastinating.  

Unfortunately, we learn this as young people and form habits of procrastination. We learn to opt for instant gratification versus the long-term gratification. We avoid the stress in the short term and we end up pushing that stress down the road but it ends up still coming back and still being a problem. So if you are at the place in your life that you want to try and deal with procrastination and you want to make it less of a problem for you, then I’ve got four tips for you that have helped me. You will have to keep on coming back to these tips if you want to really overcome procrastination, I have found them to be very effective. 

How to Overcome Procrastination.

1. Learn to remove unnecessary distractions.

The first thing is, you need to remove unnecessary distractions. We work in a world that is filled with distractions, ranging from our smartphones to our facebook, the pop-ups that our computers give us, to the accessibility that everybody has to us via email, phone, Messenger and a myriad of other types of  communication. So there’s a constant barrage of distractions that will stop you from focusing on what you need to do. 

Tim Ferriss has written a brilliant book on this called “Four Hour Work Week.” It absolutely changed the way that I looked at my work week. One of the number one things he says is, to turn off your notifications. Get rid of your distractions when you are working, don’t leave multiple tabs open. How many of you have 20 tabs open on your computer and you flick between Facebook and what you’re doing. Well, what you’ve got to do if you want to become more efficient and procrastinate less is, get rid of all your tabs. Get rid of all your notifications, turn them off so that you can just focus on the task that is at hand. 

Most new computers actually have a function where you can actually zoom in the window that you’re working on and it removes all the other distractions on the page. It removes the top tabs, your battery bar or the bottom task bar and it just creates a full screen of what you’re focusing on. 

Turn off the notifications of your email, you do not need notifications on your email. This was a game changer for me. I did this six years ago and I haven’t looked back. You don’t actually need to check your email more than a couple of times a day. You’ll still see everything that’s important. You will realise that those incessant dings and red dots on your phone actually make you less productive. 

Turn off the notifications on Facebook and Twitter and all of your social media so that when you are working, you have less distractions and you are more focused on what you are doing. If you are in an environment where there are a lot of distractions, like people who distract you or you work from home, get into a place where you have less distractions –  a place where you don’t have people coming and asking you to do stuff.  Don’t have the TV,  youtube or other noises going on. Get in a place where there’s less distraction and you will be more focused.

2. Tackle one task at a time

The second thing is this, you need to tackle one task at a time. Researchers at Stanford University have shown quite definitively that our brain does not multitask. I know there’s an old adage that says, “Women can multitask and men can’t.” Well here’s the thing, none of us multitasks. What our brain does is work sequentially between each task that we think about or pay attention to. The brain has a switching time between those tasks, so every time we have to do multiple things, our brain takes time to switch in its focus and to catch up with what the new task is.

The reason we say that women can multitask better than men is that they are much quicker at switching. That’s a whole other conversation, but because women can switch between the left and right brain much quicker it appears that they can multitask. They’re not multitasking, they’re still working sequentially but they just do it a lot more efficiently. 

Either way, if you pick one task to work on and do it to its completion before you start another task, what you will find is,  that you eliminate that switching time and make yourself more productive and more efficient. By having multiple things on the go that you keep on switching between, you are going to make yourself far less efficient. Something that could take you an hour to do will end up taking you five hours just because you didn’t focus, you didn’t remove distractions and prioritize one task at a time. 

3. Use a Timer

The third tip is this, use a timer.  This may be hard for you to do at first. I know that many of the younger generation, who work on my team or in my church,  find it really hard to stay focused for long periods of time. They  have grown up in a world with lots of distractions and so they’ll often have youtube running in the background while they’re working. They’ll have their snapchat popping up while they’re working and this is a huge distraction.

So when asked to do one task at a time, they become very uncomfortable with the silence. Maybe you’re like that. You become very uncomfortable with the lack of distraction. Well here’s what you do, if you want to focus for long periods. You’ve got to set yourself a timer for work. Figure out a reasonable amount of time that you can stay focused. 

A good starting point is your age plus three minutes. Let’s say you’re 17 years old, plus 3 which is 20. So for 20 minutes, set yourself a time and say, ” I’m going to work with no distractions on one task for 20 minutes.” When that timer goes off, give yourself a break. We’ll talk about breaks in a moment. Let’s say you’re 25, give yourself 25 minutes plus three minutes and set yourself a timer. Work for that period of time. Then gave a break.

If you saw my video on Parkinson’s Law, you would realise that when you set a time limit for your work, you become more focused and more efficient. Your brain understands that when there are time limits and time constraints on your work, it needs to focus harder. By using a timer and avoiding distractions, you will actually find yourself becoming more efficient. 

4. Give yourself a break.

The last tip which I’ve already alluded to is, give yourself a break. Once you break down your workload into blocks of time, what you can do is give yourself a regular break. Now that doesn’t mean go and have a break for 30 minutes. Give yourself a five minute break, get up, take a walk around or go and get a coffee. Do something just to break the pattern because you’ve got to reward yourself for focusing. 

Your brain loves rewards and so, if you give it a reward for focusing at the end of your 25 minutes, you’re saying, “Well done! I focused for 25 minutes, now I’m going to get myself a coffee.” Now your brain knows that the next time you set yourself a task, it’s going to get a reward and so it will have a tendency to work more efficiently because it understands there is a reward at the end. So give yourself regular breaks, don’t try and work for three, four or five hours at a time.

What you will probably find is, if you break down those long time periods into shorter segments, with breaks in between, you will work more efficiently and accomplish more than if you work for several hours at a stretch with no breaks. 

Whether you jump on Facebook, look at a youtube video or just walk around,  plan for your breaks. You’ll waste less time, be more focused and more efficient in the way that you work. 

So these are the four tips that I found have helped me as a procrastinator. It is really important if you want to up the quality of your work and how you operate. You need to deal with procrastination, you need to remove distractions, do one thing at a time, set yourself time limits based around your ability to focus and keep increasing that time as you get better at it. Always remember to give yourself regular breaks and reward yourself when you focus and get your work done. I’m sure you will become less of a procrastinator and more efficient as you work, if you follow these four tips. 

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