How To Simply Stop Procrastinating When All The Focus App Failed You

Richard Snow
Nov 5 · 6 min read
Photo by Lance Anderson on Unsplash

Disclaimer: The concept that I’m going to share here to you is working for all types of computer and phone user. But the method I’m going to show you is only working for Windows and Iphone user only. Note that I’m not responsible for any damage that may happen when you do what has been written here.

I was on the journey to search for the best app that can stop me from procrastinating.

It is a big topic nowadays. And apparently not only me has this problem. Experts come with a bunch of research and suggested ways to overcome it, but for me it’s still happening.

When you sit in front of your desk, starting to look at that monitor, glance at your to do list, you nod to agree what should you do next.

But then without you realized, you already opened like 27 tab on your browser, and 45 minutes had already passed.

And yet nothing happened. None of the to do list completed.

And without any surprise, we do really know this thing is happening everyday. And we keep on still doing it.

So I tried a couple of focus apps. You know, the one that you press the start button then countdown to 25 minutes then ring a bell.

Or the one that will grow trees, and a town.

They are all good apps. And normally they also come with a fancy graph for tracking, which to be honest I like very much.

But the thing is we (at least for me) procrastinate by browsing the internet, at our computer or laptop. While the app is in our phone.

Actually it doesn’t make sense. The controller is outside the thing we want to control.

Even if the app ring a bell to tell us to stop, we just going to silent the phone, or close the app and still continue to read that 21 list of blog post.

After all our attention at that particular time was not at our phone but our computer. Our source of problem is our computer not our phone.

We might need to focus on the computer. And if its internet browsing, perhaps focus on the browser?

So here you might suggest to use browser extension or add-on. Lot’s of them there, with similar concept and function that we could find in the phone app.

They are all good as well. Well thought on functionality and most built up base on pomodoro framework.

But most of them work by blocking sites, defined by us. Manual work. Other than those well known time waster websites, there are actually million more websites that have the possibility to try to waste our time. We can’t block it one by one. Some that we blocked, we might genuinely want to visit it to complete our task.

Some might set a countdown timer just to tell us it is time. Same with the problem that we have earlier, it’s easy to get around with it as well.

I also realized that my hand stick at my mouse long when I procrastinate. It just move and click without me even notice about it.

So I have been thinking…

If we could just take a moment and stop staring at the monitor, take our hand of the mouse, that would give us a trigger to stop what we were doing and to bring back our focus to what’s matter.

One day my boss called me from his office, which normally I will hear and stand up and say yes

But this time, I was having a good time procrastinating, staring at my screen reading some recipe when all of a sudden my screen got locked.

Without I realized my boss was standing beside me and locked my computer. Everyone around laughed, and I can’t forget how he stared at me at that time.

But thankfully that feed me with an idea that if my computer got locked I will pause and stop with whatever I was doing, and give me a moment to recall back what needs to be done.

So far the way that I used to lock my computer (obviously for security purpose when I’m away from my computer) was press ctrl, alt and delete button at the same time and press enter (yes I’m using Windows).

So if..

If we can make my computer get locked automatically (which replace my boss to lock my computer for me), in maybe a certain time frame, it can help me to stop from keep on procrastinating on that time.

For example, we could make my computer automatically lock every 30 minutes. So that we will never procrastinate more than that.

I googled on how to do this. How to automatically lock my computer for every 30 minutes. Apparently instead of pressing that 3 buttons at the same time, you could just enter simple command in your command prompt, which then lock your computer. It goes like below

%windir%\System32\rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation

And then to make it automatically lock for us, apparently we need to create a simple script; or what they call it as a batch file. To create this file, open a notepad, enter below text

@echo off
timeout /t 1800
%windir%\System32\rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation
exit

then click File > Save As

Select the location where you want to save the file. At the “Save as type:”, select “All Files”, then at “File name:” name your file with “.bat” at the end. For example “lockmypc.bat”, then click “Save”.

It will create a .bat file (read as batch file) for you. Double click on it, it will open a command prompt alike window, with

Waiting for 1799 seconds, press a key to continue ...

written on it, where the number is counting down. There you go, we got something that we want. Note that the “1800” is seconds, which equal to 30 minutes. You can adjust this number to fit your need.

But, with that it will run only once.

Which means, once it locked our computer, we need to double click it again to run. So what we can do is, we make the file to open itself again before it closed. We add below

start "Lock my pc" "lockmypc.bat"

before the lock command, where “lockmypc.bat” is the batchfile’s filename. In result we will something like below

@echo off
timeout /t 1800
start "Lock my pc" "lockmypc.bat"
%windir%\System32\rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation
exit

To make it more interesting, we could make it auto start whenever we ON our computer, by put the shortcut of the file in startup folder.

To do this, right click on the file and select “Create shortcut”, then the shortcut will be created. Copy that file to your startup folder, and you are done.

When you start to use it, you might feel irritating or annoying. As you sometimes you will got locked on something critical or on climax matter. But just remember on why you do this at the first place.

If we try to see it the other way around, once we already control our procrastination, this could help us to better focus ourselves. Since we know we have only 30 minutes before our computer get locked, we will give our best to complete our task.

Also, it will become a trigger for us, telling 30 minutes has passed, its time to maybe move our eyes from the screen, drink water, stand up and stretch a bit of ourselves, and why not have a little chat with other persons.


My private client did mentioned that this simple trick saved more than thousands of dollars productivity time for him. If this how to helped you in any good ways maybe you could leave me some tips at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/strichard

Richard Snow

Written by

Entertained with gospel on productivity, automation, relationship and family. Buy me coffee at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/strichard

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