Procrastination – a monster that causes human beings to adopt the “practice of carrying out less urgent tasks in preference to more urgent ones, or doing more pleasurable things in place of less pleasurable ones, and thus putting off impending tasks to a later time, sometimes to the “last minute” before the deadline [1]”. I believe within every single human being lies this monster named “Procrastination”. Monster may be too harsh a word to use to describe procrastination as not all procrastination is bad [2]. But, left unattended, this monster is capable of destroying our lives. Leaving us miserable and in more serious cases anxious and highly stressed. However, given the right tools and practice, any mere mortal can put a tight leash on this monster to exert some control over it. What I want to share here is my own little battles (experiments) with gaining control over monster “Procrastination” by combining tools learnt from the Coursera’s MOOC: Learning How To Learn and other productivity tools I have come to learn about.
A little background
A little more than 3 years ago, I was a fresh-eyed graduate that started my professional career with all the zest and idealistic notions of what a career means. Little did I know what was about to hit me. A year later, I was in a rut, a mental/psychological one. Even though I was able to complete tasks at work well, I was unhappy. Anxiety and stress filled most of my days. The main cause of this rut was my inability to learn quickly really hard domains of mathematics and computer science for work purposes. By quickly, I meant picking up knowledge in those domains in a few days and then using them to solve real world problems (very naive now that I have come to be know about the need for the brain to rest and work in the background [3]). No one was unhappy my work but by my own “crazy” standards I thought I should be able to learn a lot faster. What made the anxiety and stress worst was that monster. Yes that “Procrastination” Monster. Due to the abstractness of some of the mathematics and computer science knowledge I was trying to pick up, learning them in a short space of time seemed like an enormous and painful task. I kept procrastinating by watching Youtube videos, watching TV, etc. whenever that unpleasant feeling comes up before reading on what I wanted to learn. Basically, my stress levels compounded and I just felt miserable.
To get myself out of this rut and rein in the monster, I set about doing my own research on becoming more productive at learning. Throughout the research process and my undertaking of the Learning How To Learn course, I did find a whole lot of productivity tools that many successful people in the world use to control their “Procrastination” monster. Through personal experiments and lessons from the Learning How To Learn course, here is the current combination of tools and knowledge I find most effective in taking control of the monster in my attempts to learn new things.
Tackle the Monster Early
If you have not form good study or work habits with regards to overcoming the monster, you may have to rely on a little willpower at the start of the day to override behavioral cues that cause procrastination. For those who are interested in learning about habit forming, there are 4 parts to every habit we want to adopt [4]:
- The cue – the trigger that causes some form of response to be performed. (E.g. Seeing a to-do reminder on your phone might be a cue to work on the to-do)
- The routine – the response to the cue (E.g. working on the a to-do task that was triggered by a to-do reminder on your phone)
- The reward – the feeling of pleasure from completing the routine (E.g. feeling of satisfaction after completing a small learning task)
- The belief – the belief that you can adopt the habit (E.g belief that you can build a habit of learning)
Adopting any habit requires that you have all 4 parts aligned. From personal experience, I do find that a little willpower is required to ignore my own procrastination cues such as going to youtube.com during the initial phases when I was trying to follow a plan in learning something new. However, according to Roy Baumeister in his research on willpower [5], willpower decreases over the course of the day. Moreover, using willpower is an expensive neural task that takes up a lot of energy [5]. So, it is highly recommended that you plan to start tackling the “Procrastination” monster early in the day so that you do have enough willpower to override any procrastination cues before you. Before I adopted a good habit of reading for 30 minutes as one of the first few tasks after waking up daily, I had to used a little willpower every morning for a couple of weeks to ignore cues that were causing me to procrastinate.
Using an analogy from sports, imagine “Procrastination” as a huge monster trying to score against you during a game of rugby, american football, basketball, soccer, etc. and what you want to do here is to tackle the monster before it can score a point against you.
Pomodoro Technique + Thinking Process rather than Product
The Pomodoro Technique pioneered by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s is a productivity technique where a timer is used to break work down into 25 minutes length followed by short breaks in between [6]. Each 25 minute Pomodoro is characterized by intense focus on the task at hand before a short period of rest [6]. I have learnt about the Pomodoro Technique before learning about the technique from Coursera’s MOOC: Learning How To Learn. However, adopting the technique was frustrating as I kept getting distracted during each 25-minute Pomodoro. So I gave up on adopting this technique as part of stopping the “Procrastination” monster toolbox.
However, Dr Barbara Oakley’s Learning How To Learn lecture about focusing on the process of working on each Pomodoro rather than the completely finishing the task at hand [7] gave me the mindset to start using the Pomodoro technique effectively to overcome procrastination. My mistake with my initial trial with Pomodoro was with my own mindset. When I first tried out the Pomodoro technique, I was rushing to complete a learning/work task within a few Pomodoros. Thinking that the less Pomodoros means I was better at the task. As a result, I was starting to get less pleasure from working on each Pomodoro as the amount of Pomodoros stack up while attempting to complete a single task. Consequently, our dear monster started taking over resulting in many hours of unproductive procrastination. What truly changed now is with my mindset in seeing each Pomodoro as part of the process to completing a task instead of seeing additional Pomodoros as a sign of inefficiency at a task. Moreover, the number of Pomodoros used for each task has now become a good way to quantify the amount of time required to finish a task.
The Anti-To-Do List to boost Motivation
So far, I have been speaking about tools used control the “Procrastination” monster. I personally use another tool that helps ignore the “Procrastination” Monster by boosting personal motivation. I have very little scientific knowledge about how motivation truly works. However, I look at it as a form of willpower to override the temptations dished out by the “Procrastination” monster. Whenever I feel like procrastinating, what I do is I would look at my Anti-To-Do List to boost my motivation and get started on the task immediately.
What exactly is the Anti-To-Do List? It is a list that holds the list of items that are completed by you daily [8]. This technique was pioneered by Marc Andreessen, famous entrepreneur and investor, who founded Netscape, Opsware, Ning, and Venture Capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, as a way see progress on what he completed on a single day. Marc explains the impact of an Anti-To-Do list here [8]:
“Each time you do something, you get to write it down and you get that little rush of
endorphins that the mouse gets every time he presses the button in his cage and gets
a food pellet.
And then at the end of the day… take a look at today’s card and its Anti-Todo list
and marvel at all the things you actually got done that day.”
I have personally modified the use of an Anti-To-Do List to suit my own learning goals. Instead of writing down everything I have done during the day on just one list, I keep a separate Anti-To-Do List to track my progress towards learning something new. Whenever I complete a Pomodoro towards learning something, I write it down in the list. At any point in time when I feel like procrastinating before embarking on a Pomodoro to learn something, I would have a look at the list and remind myself of my progress. I would ask myself: “Having put effort into starting this, do you really want to give it up and procrastinate?” Almost always, I will put this list aside and begin whatever task I wanted to work on immediately.
A To-Do List to Balance Things Out
Another tool which I have recently experimented with is writing a To-Do List for the next day before sleep. I first came across this tool while watching one of the lectures of the Learning How To Learn course. As Dr Barbara Oakley mentioned in the lecture, writing down a To-Do List before sleep gives the brain the opportunity to grapple with the tasks and come up with the ideas to complete each task while you sleep [9]. I
I have started writing a To-Do list before going to sleep for the past 5 days and found it useful in a couple of ways. Firstly, I make both a mental and written commitment to a time where I stop all forms of work. This little trick makes me to wake up in the morning feeling excited to start completing all the To-Do tasks before the stop time. I hardly have time to allow myself to succumb to the “Procrastination” monster. Secondly, the planning and writing down of the things I want to do the next day gives me clarity on what I need to do. Once I wake up, I do not need to think or decide what I should do next. I just wake up and start following through all the tasks even if there are minor distractions such as replying important emails in between tasks. The “Procrastination” monster still tries to tempt me in between tasks but my mental commitment towards a stop time helps me ignore such temptations. Lastly, my mood and emotions is a lot more stable as I know what to expect throughout the day. A logical explanation to the more stable mood and emotions is the fact that my brain was coming up with ideas to complete each task while I am asleep so that when I am awake I feel prepared to work on the task.
That’s all the tools and tricks I have used successfully so far to battle the “Procrastination” monster within me. I hope my reflection in this post will help people win their battle with their own monster. Onwards!
References:
[1]: Wikipedia.com. Procrastination. Retrieved 25th August 2014
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrastination
[2]: Paul Graham’s blog. Good and Bad Procrastination. Retrieved 25th August 2014
http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
[3]: Learning how to learn: Powerful mental tools to help your master tough subjects. Week 1: “Introduction to focused and diffuse modes” and “Using the focused and diffuse modes — Or a little Dali will do you” video lectures. Retrieved 1st August 2014
http://www.coursera.org/course/learning
[4]: Learning how to learn: Powerful mental tools to help your master tough subjects. Week 3: “Zombies everywhere” video lecture. 15th August 2014
http://www.coursera.org/course/learning
[5]: Stanford Medicine. The science of willpower. 29th December 2011
[6]: Wikipedia.com. Pomodoro Technique. Retrieved 25th August 2014
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique
[7]: Learning how to learn: Powerful mental tools to help your master tough subjects. Week 3: “Surf’s up: Process vs product” video lecture. 15th August 2014
http://www.coursera.org/course/learning
[8]: Walter Chen. Marc Andreessen’s Productivity Trick to Feeling Marverlously Efficient. 23rd October 2012
Marc Andreessen’s Productivity Trick to Feeling Marvelously Efficient
[7]: Learning how to learn: Powerful mental tools to help your master tough subjects. Week 3: “Juggling life and learning” video lecture. 15th August 2014
Reflections on Productive Learning 