Dealing with procrastination
Procrastination, Book I'm reading, and vacation update.
Hi everyone,
In this newsletter:
Short update about my travels
Book I am reading
Thoughts about beating procrastination
Right now I am in Voss visiting Vanjas grandmother who just turned 90 years old. She can’t believe she is that old, and that makes me think of my own age. This year I am turning 35, but I still feel like I am 20 years old, only with more experience. Only five years left until I’m 40 though, and have a mid life crisis.
Next week I’ll be visiting Sweden and my parents in a forest in Småland.
Book I am reading
I am currently deep into the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. It is a fantasy series about friendship, trust, love, heroes, and mystical powers. A girl who gains powerful abilities that she has to take responsibility for to save her friends. Right now I am at the third book. I stay up too late reading this book every day, thinking, Just one more page.
Thinking about productivity
These last few weeks before vacation have been some of the most productive weeks at work during the last six months. Why? Here is what I think:
For the past month or so I have mainly focused on a single task. Every day I know what to do, and I don’t have to check the calendar. I can keep the project and its task in my head. So when I come to the office in the morning, I know what my task is and I know what to do. There is no need to plan my day. Aside from making me more productive, this has also made my mind clearer and I feel better just having one thing to think about.
I am learning something. I love learning and it is always easy for me to be engaged when I am learning something interesting.
I am seeing progress, getting feedback and small wins all the time, and I’m getting into flow state. This is the good part about programming and fiddling with embedded systems. Embedded programming is hard, and just understanding something and making something work is very satisfying, even if it is just to get the damn thing to run without errors.
There is external pressure on getting this thing done. External accountability is indeed very compelling, especially when there is a deadline and people depend on you getting that thing done.
I have reduced my own pressure on being productive. I listened to Huberman’s podcast about focus a while ago. In the podcast he talks about the limitations of focus in humans, that we don’t really have that much time for hard focused work. He says that 90 minutes, including 10-15 minutes for getting into focus, is the limit for most people before they start becoming tired and needing a break. Most people can only do two of these bouts during a working day. That is only three hours of deep focus in a working day. What to do during the rest of the working hours? Take a break, do easier tasks, learn something new, and don’t be so hard on yourself if you are too tired to do work that requires deep focus. For me, as long as I get 2x90 minutes of deep work without distractions, I feel great about my day.
No meetings. I don’t usually have many meetings. But what I notice is that meetings is not just a hindrance to productivity because of the time it uses, but also because of the mental occupation of knowing that you have a meeting in so and so many hours. Without meetings I feel freer in a way, and I feel like I can think deeper because I know I have the whole day to just concentrate on one thing.
Breaks. I try to take breaks before I get tired. Closing my eyes for 10 minutes in my office, or going down to the gym for a brief workout and lying down for a bit afterward.
Avoiding distractions and procrastination. I use the Freedom app to block websites that I don’t really need to have access to, like news sites, reddit, and so on. I use this app on both my work PC and mobile phone. I have done this for a long time now, and it really helps. I have a tendency to just flip open a tab and procrastinate by browsing some website whenever there is a slightly uncomfortable task. But now, when I get to the office in the morning, my brain knows that I cannot procrastinate by browsing, so its easier to just get going with the work. Just sitting around and doing nothing gets boring after a while, so I might as well do the task.
Out of all these points, the easiest way for me to be productive is to just have a task that is interesting and that I like doing (duhh). Then everything else just kind of handles itself. It’s not always easy to find those kind of tasks though.
In addition to the points above, there are two more techniques I like for avoiding procrastination:
The 5-minute rule. Sometimes, the hardest thing for me is to just get started. Sometimes because the task is overwhelming, or I don’t know what to do, or any other thought that makes thinking about the task uncomfortable. But once I start on the task I soon get momentum and it feels easy to keep doing the task. The 5-minute rule is a way to trick the mind by promising myself that I only have to work on this task for 5 minutes, and if I don’t feel continuing after that time I can do something else. Funnily enough, most of the time I just keep doing the task after those 5 minutes and kind of forget about the 5 minute limit.
Making a daily schedule. I do this when I am not entirely sure how to spend my day. I write down the hours of the work day, from 8 to 16, and I write what I want to work on during each hour. I also add in meetings and other commitments. Even if I don’t follow the schedule precisely, due to any reason (like forgetting the time or misjudging how long something would take), knowing what I am supposed to do each hour is very helpful because whenever I am in a procrastination state I don’t have to figure out what I should do (which I can also procrastinate on). I can just look at my schedule and see what I am supposed to do, and then start to make myself ready, or make the task small enough that I start. Maybe even using the 5-minute rule. 😉
That ended up being a long newsletter about productivity. Hope you liked it. If so, let me know by liking or commenting. I want this newsletter to be useful or fun to read, so, please let me know.
Have a great weekend.
-Eric