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I've read lots of books (Eat That Frog, Getting Things Done, The Pomodoro Technique, The Now Habit) and tons of blog posts on procrastination and rarely do I find them very actionable (heh). Here's three techniques that work for me: 1. Baby Steps 2. Warp Speed 3. Multitask __ Baby Steps Do the simplest possible step to start the task, and repeat. For example, just open your word processor or IDE. Just write one sentence or prototype one function. Make a list of five topics for an essay or five requirements for a new block of code. If you get going, great. If not, look for the next baby step to move forward. Warp Speed Sometimes Baby Steps is not enough motivation if I really find a task distasteful or my perfectionism has set in, so I challenge myself to complete the task in some ridiculously small amount of time. For example, can I complete this 10 page essay in ... 15 minutes? Of course, spending days thinking of ideas that will win a Pulitzer is now out of the question. I have 30 seconds to outline the paper. 1.5 minutes to write each page. It's a mad dash of stream-of-consciousness to try to finish. At the end of 15 minutes, I'm usually left with either: a) a pretty terrible paper but a mental outline of ideas that I can make good by multiple re-writes, b) an actually submittable paper because I forgot about the 15min deadline an hour ago and I've been in flow the entire time. The key to Warp Speed is that I'm allowed throw away the first, second, or third drafts and start again with the ideas that were gained. Another technique that works with Warp Speed is to imagine yourself hitting SEND on the email to your professor, with essay attached, or hitting submit on the PR to your team with the new code you've written. Imagining the reaction of others helps me focus on what is absolutely essential to the project. What is the minimum level of quality that I need to avoid embarrassing myself? Once I have that, I can continue to iterate and improve if the project is worth it, or submit and move on if it's not worth my time. Multitask I know. I know. Multitasking is bad. But sometimes I get blocked on a Very Important Project because what I really want to be working on are some pie-in-the-sky almost-certainly-waste-of-time projects like designing a new programming language from scratch, or creating a new video game, or researching Machine Learning. But it would be totally irresponsible to work on those projects before the Very Important Project, and I really don't want to work on that, so I'll just spin here in procrastination land playing video games and watching Youtube for 10 hours. Instead, I multitask. I open a window and start prototyping the new programming language, I open another window and start brainstorming game ideas, and I open a third window and start working on Very Important Project. After I've made some progress or hit a lull on the fun projects I switch to the VIP and work on that. And now that I'm started on the VIP, and it is very important, I'll just finish it off quickly so I can focus on the fun projects. |