The Single Best Advice For Procrastination
The Steps to Beat Procrastination Once and For All
If you’re still looking for productivity advice, then you’ll probably hear the same sort of techniques.
- Remove distractions
- Use Pomodoro
- Do the hardest thing first
I’m not going to say that these don’t work. They wouldn’t be so common if they didn’t. But each of them is broad and has its downsides.
Removing distractions is easier said than done. Especially if your work means you are one click away from scrolling on social media.
Pomodoro doesn’t work for everyone. Other techniques have been proven to be much better such as the 52–17 split by DeskTime or splitting work periods by tasks rather than time spent.
Doing the hardest thing first is great if you can, but it’s difficult to know what the most difficult thing is. This doesn’t work for tasks that rely on the completion of previous ones.
The truth is, these are good techniques, but everybody is different. Not just in a special and unique sense, but also in the environment you live or grew up in.
If you lived your whole life with short-term entertainment like social media, you either need to spend a couple of weeks dopamine detoxing yourself to improve concentration or use a technique that works for you.
Simply put, productivity isn’t something that can be conquered with one special technique. It’s the combination of many small habits that add up to having a significant impact.
So here are the two best techniques that have worked tremendously for me and my friends. Again, if you want you can try these out, but they’re not guaranteed to work for every individual. If they work then great! Else move on and try out things until something sticks.
Split Tasks Not Time
There are many types of productivity splits and all of them rely on one idea, don’t work constantly and take breaks. Taking breaks is great to not burn out, come up with new ideas, and maintain work for long periods of time.
The most famous of these is the Pomodoro; 25-minutes of work followed by 5-minutes of rest.
Of course, the technique is famous for a good reason; it probably works for a lot of people. But it never felt right with me. As mentioned previously, researchers found that the best split is the 52–17; 52 minutes of work with 17 minutes for breaks.
I highly recommend trying it out if Pomodoro doesn’t seem to work for you. The work times are long enough to get stuff done; breaks are long enough where you can refresh, but not too long where it’s difficult to get back to work again.
But, something that has worked much better for me is changing up the focus of the splits. While their main focus is splitting up work into time fragments, a better way is to split it up by tasks instead.
What you would do is you would work on a task that you estimate will take you 40–50 minutes to complete then take a medium sized break.
You’ve probably had those bursts of motivation where you are hyper-focused on a task and see it to completion, not resting until it is done. This is the exact feeling this technique is harnessing.
The benefits?
- You are more focused since it’s one task
- There aren’t mandatory breaks that pull you out of your focus
- Helps you better gauge the length of the project to schedule better
Get Started
No, I don’t mean just use your willpower to get started and finish whatever you have. If you could do that then you don’t need any advice.
Have you ever noticed how it’s just starting the project that takes you ages to get to? But when you finish that topic sentence on your essay or open those first few tabs for your research, you find that motivation you need.
What does this mean? Get the initial ideas down and work on the rest later when you have time.
If you have homework, do the first question in class and start working on the rest when you go home. If you have a project to do, make the plan and create the research word document.
You’ll find that you’ll be more comfortable starting the task later when you have some stuff down, rather than nothing at all.
What to Take-away
The main takeaway here is that learning to improve productivity is not a journey to find one technique. Instead, it should be the product of a few smaller techniques that work for you.
Everyone is unique in their experiences and the type of work they need to be productive for. What works for one person doesn’t mean it’ll work for another. It is your job to test out techniques and hacks to know if they’re working for you.
I’ve given my two cents on the things that have given me the best improvement for my productivity, it’s time to see if they’ll work for you!
