My struggles against procrastination and how to become more focused

Being on a computer with an Internet connection is both a blessing and a curse. How do I become more productive? Here I list some of the tools that I use.

Things that has been on my mind lately are productivity and focus. Like many others, having a life filled with doohickeys and gadgets is awesome, but at the same time I also feel that I am losing a part of myself due to the plethora of options in front of me when sitting with my computer. The Internet provides so much that it can sometimes be hard to focus on anything.

It has long been a goal of mine to procrastinate less and spend my time more optimally, for example using more time on creating and learning new things, instead of passively consuming content such as browsing websites and watching YouTube videos. I need better focus. Do less, focus more.

I am that type of person who will try to remove all unnecessary clutter in a graphical user interface that might tempt me into procrastination. It is not because I have a low attention span or anything (I would say that I am above average), but I just don’t like distractions, that’s all.

Over the years I have tried multiple approaches to become more focused when working on a computer with Internet access. The following will describe some of the tools I have used.

The Pomodoro Technique
You probably already know about this. In short, it is a way to structure your working time. The key theme here is focus: you narrow your focus down to a single task, working 100% on it for a short period of time (e.g. 25 minutes) and afterwards take a small break (e.g. two minutes). This earns you one tomato point (“pomodoro” is Italian and means “tomato”). You continue doing this until a task has been completed. There are other aspects, but this is the main concept.

The Pomodoro Technique doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with computers (an analog egg timer would do it), but many people do their work in front of a screen these days, so it seems logical to have some kind of computer program that can track one’s progress. I have tried different programs, such as Tomighty and Keep Focused. However, my favorite is Pomodoro App. Why? Because it has a really nice interface that works as a simple to-do list where you can list all of the tasks on a wall. Then, each day, you will look at the list and decide which of the tasks that are realistic to complete today and drag them to “Today’s Tasks”. Of course, you have to be honest with yourself and only pick what you think you’ll be able to complete today.

All in all, the Pomodoro App is a nice tool. It is great to be able to see how many tomatoes you have obtained in total. We used it in my university group for a few weeks and found that it to be be a good motivation factor, since we started competing in gathering (harvesting?) the most tomatoes. However, the program does not have any kind of online leaderboard system that can supports this; we would have to manually sync/write our progress on a blackboard, so the the team could keep track of each other’s score. It would be neat with a feature where you can have a small group of people being able to see how many tomatoes each have earned on a shared project, maybe even integrating it with something like Podio or Trello.

I like the philosophy behind The Pomodoro Technique, and to some degree it works. However, in practice it can be difficult to use it properly all the time. Having to manually start the timer becomes tedious (especially if you are doing something where you are away from the computer). Also, it can sometimes kill one’s working flow having to take small breaks at 25-minutes intervals, even if you don’t feel like needing a break. It really depends on the specific working context whether or not I prefer to use Pomodoro.

StayFocusd
StayFocusd is a neat anti-procrastination extension for Google Chrome. I use it to minimize the time I spend on certain non-productive websites such as Facebook, Gmail and gaming forums. It is quite simple: each time you visit a blacklisted website, a timer counts down. If there is no more time left, you are prevented access to all the websites that are on the blacklist, until the timer resets the next day. In my case I have set the timer to 10 minutes, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but for me it seems to be a good threshold. It allows me just enough time to check some of my social stuff on Twitter, Facebook and whatnot.

StayFocusd works really well. The only problem I have is that is too easy to disable it and thereby brute forcing its functionality. Unfortunately, this does happen more often that I would like to admit.

Focus@Will
This tool is a little different, since Focus@Will is an online music-streaming service. However, it doesn’t host the music that you normally listen to, but instead it has a wide range of special music that is supposed to increase your attention span. The music is meant to be playing subtly in the background so you don’t notice it, but still stimulating your brain so you hit a sweet spot of concentration. The website has a lot of scientific explanations for how it all works, so I will spare you the details here.

Whether the music works in practice or not is hard to say, but I decided for myself that I would use it whenever I felt like I wanted to be really productive. Together with a pair of headphones (that I recently bought for the purpose of using it with Focus@Will), this has become my go-to tool whenever I want to really focus on a specific task; it helps me going into a state of flow. Maybe it is a placebo effect, but having used it the last couple of weeks have been a positive experience, especially when sitting in a room with multiple people talking to each other. It works both in browsers and as a download app on Android and iOS (coming soon). Right now I am using it as an “application shortcut” in Chrome, meaning that it works as a separate program without address bars, bookmarks and all the other interface things a web browser normally has.

What Are You Doing Right Now!?
I recently discovered a program called TagTime that randomly pops up and asks you what you are doing. In short, it allows you to take random samples of yourself and see if you are spending your time on the right things, while creating statics via Beeminder. This idea intrigued me, but sadly I wasn’t able to get it to work on Windows. Therefore I decided to develop a small program myself as a WinForms app in Visual Studio. I named it “What Are You Doing Right Now!?”, since that is the only purpose it has: to make me aware of what I am doing right now.

The program is hidden in the system tray per default, but at random time intervals (between 15 and 120 minutes) it pops up and asks me to write down what I am doing right now (e.g. “Writing a post on Medium”). This is then saved to a simple txt file. The idea is that the mere act of having to consciously “confess” about what I am spending my time on will help me to become better at delegating the time. Whether or not it works I don’t know yet, but it is my hope that I in the long run will be more aware of how I spend my time in front of the computer. If not, I still have a neat little text diary that displays what I have been working on during the day.

Freedom
The last tool on my list is Freedom, which I just found yesterday. Freedom is an “all-or-nothing” app that blocks your access to the Internet for a set amount of time (e.g. 45 minutes). When you hit the button, there is no going back. You can’t deactivate it; you are simply cut off from the Internet until the timer runs out (however, you can still reboot the computer). I imagine I will be using this whenever I have a long article to read or write, but other than that it is a pretty big decision to totally shut off Internet access while being on the computer. Many times I am researching something and need to look stuff up online (e.g. when programming or writing an essay for the university). It would be annoying to have to restart my computer just to quickly look something up on the Internet.