How You Conspire to Beat the Procrastination Busters

photo credit: atconc

I have plenty of personal projects and goals I want to pursue in addition to my paid employment, but the time I can spend on them is relatively scant and must be shared with my other non-work activities.

Sound familiar?

At the end of the day or at the weekend when I turn my attention to these projects, I find my motivation ups and vanishes. At an intellectual level these are things I want to do, but where the rubber hits the road at the end of a day’s work, often I’d rather just read a book or watch a DVD.

Does that description chime with you?

This is a particular form of procrastination, a stalwart of the productivity literature. But no matter how many lists of ten surefire ways to kick start my productivity I read, I am still weak in this area.

In this post I’m going to take some of the most commonly offered tips to address this problem and set out why I can’t make them work, at least not consistently. Rather than end on a complete downer, I’ve also got one ray of hope, but you’ll have to read to the end for that…

Firewall time

You always go to work because that time is non-negotiable, you can’t often choose just not to go to work or to put off going until some other time. So you show up and leave at the usual times, give or take.

One popular tip to get you moving towards your personal goals is to adopt this same mindset in relation to the time you devote to them. Your paid working hours might be 9- 5 Monday to Friday, so you might make your personal project hours 7-12 Saturday and Sunday. You show up at 7 and leave at 12.

Except it doesn’t work like that. You don’t get in trouble with the boss if you don’t show up for your project time. It’s not like you risk not getting paid. You don’t have the same routine around putting on your work gear and making the commute that tells your brain it’s work time. Plus, because this is your ‘free’ time, life gets in the way: shopping, housework, DIY, seeing friends. Your projects are competing with all these other demands on your non-work time.

Make sure you really want to do it

The logic goes that if you don’t want something badly enough, you won’t put in the hard work to get it. That’s true up to a point. But in my experience there are things I don’t absolutely have to accomplish, but which I’d like to get done, enough that I don’t just want to give up on ever doing them. These fall into a difficult grey area just shy of ‘must do’ on the importance scale.

Make a commitment

You ask somebody you trust to hold you accountable to completing a given project. This plays on your fear of letting people down (if you have one…) and the idea that you will avoid the shame of admitting to somebody you respect that you’ve broken your commitment.

Except in reality you can quite often make excuses to get let off. You were too busy, you had that major crisis to deal with, you’ve been feeling ill. To fight this, you make another commitment and this time you tie a larger penalty to failure. A fun example of this I heard was to give your friend a signed cheque for a substantial sum made payable to a political party with which you strongly disagree. But would your friend actually go through with posting the cheque if you failed in your task? Don’t you think you’d be able to persuade them not to? Most people will cave to such pressure, and you’re right back where you started.

Keep starting

Particularly when working on big projects, success looks a long way off. So instead of trying to finish, you just keep starting. If you can start work on a project five times a week, you’ll likely make progress. But if I know I’m going to be working on the same project again tomorrow, I’m apt to think ‘hey, I can goof off today and just knuckle down tomorrow instead’. But as they say, tomorrow never comes.

You fight back, setting intermediate success milestones with rewards attached to them. But the rewards you set are too small to entice you, or you manage to justify taking the rewards without doing the work because, you know, you tried really hard and it wasn’t your fault you didn’t quite get there.

Set deadlines

Often you get things done at your paid employment because you have a deadline to meet and there are negative consequences in not meeting it. Applying logic to the problem, you might take a similar approach to your personal goals and set deadlines for their completion. But often these deadlines are arbitrary, there are no real consequences of failing to achieve them other than feeling bad that you let yourself down. You don’t like that feeling, but it doesn’t seem so bad when you decide to slack off and play video games.

Where next?

The biggest lesson to take from all of this is that there is no magic bullet to suddenly making yourself productive in your free time. My feeling is that there’s a temptation to put too much faith in these tips and hacks, that if you can just find enough tricks and apply them properly, you’ll be super-productive all the time. But that just isn’t the case.

So how can you persuade yourself to get on with achieving your goals? Try to focus on the benefits - what will be better or different when the project is complete? It’s not infallible by any means, but it helps a little, and I think that’s the most you can hope for.

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