How to stop procrastinating and start getting s*** done.

Sebastian Bryers
Aug 23, 2017 · 5 min read

One of the toughest things about this post-modern, digitised world is sitting at a desk, bathed in fluorescent light, staring at a screen, and trying to knock out some work that you really don’t want to do.

Amen April.

Whether you’re a student at high school or university, an administrative assistant at a small company, an accountant at a big company, or a high flying exec with many minions below who should — by this juncture in your life — be doing this work for you, you’ve undoubtedly faced this moment. For many of us, we face these moments all too frequently.

These moments when you have to do boring shit.

There are myriad ways we try to reframe the work for ourselves to keep ourselves awake while doing it, like:

“Ok, I’ll race to enter at least 30 new street addresses into this spreadsheet per minute this time; yay! New record! (God I’m such a loser)”

or

“Just need to make up 10 more credible sounding quotes for this essay to be complete, maybe I’ll make all of the author’s names anagrams of F-U-C-K-T-H-I-S-S-H-I-T just to mess with the marker’s head!” (Let me know if you come up with any good ones).

Inevitably, these methods tend to result in one of two things: first, it’s likely that the work you end up doing is completed at a lower standard than it requires; second, it’s even more likely that you piss someone off in the process. So what’s a minion to do? How can you make this work actually engaging?

Truthfully? I don’t think you can. But you can do something else…

Preward yo’self!

Let’s use an example — one that worked very well for a certain sibling of mine when he was struggling with one of the most mind-numbing, disabling tasks there is to be done, but that had a potentially large reward if he did it well — a job application.

The biggest problem I’ve found with doing job applications is that they’re repetitive, but not repetitive enough that you can literally just repeat yourself. Each cover letter, each Resumé / CV introduction needs to be tailored to the skills of the position, to the duties in the job description, even to the verbiage of a particular industry (I’m looking at you certified PMPs).

So how do we approach it? Normally, we’d grind it out. We’d put ourselves in one of those dark rooms and force it, pumping out CVs and cover letters at astonishing rates, 2 per hour, 1 per hour, 1 per… ooh there’s new Stranger Things on Netflix? (Sorry, there isn’t yet).

Well it turns out that there’s a better solution. As I found out with this brother-of-mine, the best way to do hard work is to put yourself in an environment that you actually enjoy. Instead of whipping yourself with banded leather straps (unless that’s your thing), why not plop yourself down at a beach with a cool radler, or at a restaurant in front of your favourite meal? Why do the hard yards to have the reward at the end? Why not have your cake, eat it too, and get your job applications done?

This is the concept of the preward — rewarding yourself for doing a difficult task while you do it.

I’ll try not to use the term as a verb too much, but prewarding yourself has a number of benefits over the traditional grind-till-you-drop method:

  1. You put yourself in a positive state of mind to do the task at hand, which will be reflected in the work that you produce;
  2. You’re able to set artificial time constraints based on the preward you choose. it might be: the time it takes to drink a beer; the length of the sunset at the beach; or the duration of a three course meal at your favourite Thai spot; and
  3. You can control your stress levels — doing a difficult task in an environment you feel happy and safe in is a lot less stressful than doing it in a place you don’t want to be. Don’t be afraid to change up that location frequently to keep resetting that stressometer.

The Caveat

Admittedly, there are a few problems with the preward, that are only made worse by the connected nature of today’s society. So if you’re willing to give it a try, just remember these two things:

  1. Noise is not distraction. Distraction comes when you allow yourself to find signals in the noise, and choose to move your focus to interpret those signals. It’s up to you to find environs where noise is either so minimal or so dense that you’re able to rise above it.
  2. Notifications are the enemy. Yes, the enemy. They’re visual, they’re aural, and they’re tactile. Every time you get a notification, and discover the reason for having received it, you get a fleeting hit of pleasure to the brain. These endorphins wake you from your revelry and make it difficult to get back to the task at hand. You absolutely must turn off your notification devices to focus on your work and truly, passively enjoy your preward.

What’s the best kind of Preward?

I don’t know! It’s different for everyone. For me — I like to be served coffee as black as the night on a moonless night, with avocado on rich, chewy sourdough, while basking in the early morning light.

Got a good idea for a preward? Let others know! The more we share these ideas the more we can find what really works for us. Put your ideas in the comments below.

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