procrastinate less

1. Realize you are delaying something unnecessarily.
2. Discover the real reasons for your delay. List them.
3. Dispute those real reasons and overcome them. Be vigorous.
4. Begin the task.

From this article, originally found here

I’ve been doing some more reading on this, and thought I’d share a few articles, all from the same author.

• Overcoming Procrastination
• Timeboxing
• Triple Your Personal Productivity

Of course, all the techniques he talks about are obviously more effective if you have the self-discipline to do it. I doubt very much I could do all of those techniques.

The timeboxing thing is quite interesting, and I think I’ll try that just now. Basically, the idea is that you take 30 minutes to start on something, and then give yourself a reward (in this case, I’ll have lunch after I get two tasks ticked off).

...I made a comment somewhere about having a 36 hour day, by adjusting the length of each hour to be 40 minutes. I prefer my solution to attempting to do all the things listed here.

I’m not paid to produce 100 widgets a day, so I shouldn’t judge myself on tangible outputs per day.

• Did I do something today which will bring in sales for my company? Yes.
• Did I do something today to further my company’s ambitions? Yes.
• Did I do something today which is actual billable work? Yes.
• Was that actual billable work playing Pikmin 2? Yes. ;-)

So, despite looking like I was just goofing off, I was actually productive today.

Blah.

A Not-To-Do List, courtesy of another site with a number in it.

Of course, you should also add “do not go anywhere near 43Things”.

^{Note to self: stop procrastinating by reading sites which tell you how to stop procrastinating.}

I’ve done enough shilling for 43Folders, so I’m going to introduce a new site now, To-Done.

Getting started is a hard thing to do, especially if you’re looking at it from the starting point and trying to make out if that faint dot on the horizon is the end point or a fruit fly. This article advocates looking at things from the middle of the project.

However, the bit I particularly want to point out is this:

While some planning is necessary before beginning a project, too much planning can allow doubts and second thoughts to cloud your vision.

Never a truer word was writ.

I already realised that “change the world” wasn’t really such a great to-do item, and have been working on making the items on my list much finer grained.

However, this article (again from 43Folders) is a handy and useful reminder.

I’ve adopted this new technique. Basically, the idea is that you spend 10 minutes working on a task (you don’t necessarily have to finish the task), then you take a break for 2 minutes to do whatever (check your cheers on 43T, for example, or get a coffee), and repeat 5 times. Total time: one (60 minute) hour.

There are also some MP3 files at Zencast which has tracks of a specific length (in this case, 10 minutes) so you know when your focus time is over.

It worked pretty well for me last Friday, but less so today (on account of having a stinking headache). I’ll keep working with it and see how I progress. I suspect it will work well for anyone who suffers from NADD.

Incidentally, 43Folders isn’t related to 43T, 43Pl or 43Pe: the number is derived from what’s called a “tickle file”. You have 31 files for all the potential days of the month, and then 12 files for each month. I couldn’t say if that’s why the Robots chose 43 as well or not. Update: Apparently not. I just listened to a talk that Josh P gave at Ideaday and it seems that they wanted to select a prime number under 50, and 37 was already taken (sort of). They had another two versions registered, though.

As I avoid doing tasks which need to be done, I decided to amuse myself with my todo list.

Is there something about Tuesdays that prompts the phrase “someone, kill me now” to appear fully formed in my mind?