“Must. Stop. Procrastinating.”

Is there something important you have been postponing for days or even weeks and it bugs and scares you? Do you have an essay overdue, or the first draft of a paper your collaborators have been waiting for?

If the answer is “yes”, you are not alone in procrastinating and avoiding the seemingly difficult tasks. The title of this blog post “Must. Stop. Procrastinating.” appeared on the Facebook wall of one of my friends this week. And I read such “cries for help” often on Twitter and such.

I am not a stranger to the procrastination habit either. For the last two week I have been unsuccessfully trying to start drafting a scientific paper. I have not done much on it, nothing at all to be absolutely honest. And of course there were plenty of excuses: that I am tired after an intense day looking after my two children, that I have my productivity mentoring to take care of, that I want to finish a reply to my PhD student on HIS first draft of our joint paper and so on and so on.

The reality was though that after two weeks of my official collaboration time here in Russia I have not started drafting that paper. The task seemed too difficult and scared me. I needed to do something drastic. And I did. I gave myself the following advice.

1. Define a task. I decided I will focus on just making ONE table for this paper.

2. Identify the very NEXT (baby) steps you are going to take. For example, where to get the info, which papers to check, who to contact, which earlier paper or table you can use as a template etc.

3. Imagine yourself doing those things effortlessly. For example, I imagined creating a table and seeing it filled with numbers and captions and how pretty it looked. This one might sound a bit weird but it shifts your energy from avoidance to excitement about the forthcoming work.

4. Give yourself 30 min. Use a timer! Disconnect from Facebook, Twitter, Google plus etc.  Focus on this one thing for the entire time until the timer goes off. And this means no checking emails, no googling your name or other “useful information”. No other distractions whatsoever, complete focus. Do the things outlined in #2, imperfectly.

After putting children to sleep at night and having an evening snack I went to my laptop. I opened it WITHOUT plugging the internet cable, thus avoiding the distraction of aimless web browsing, checking e-mails and posting on Facebook. I had ready opened the relevant pdf files of other papers and a doc file with my paper. It was then easy to focus on the task and work on making the table for those damn 30 min!

5. Stop after 30 min. This is important. You don’t want to overdo it today and lose motivation. If you project requires days or weeks of work, do 30 min every day to gain momentum. Try it this way, it really works!! (Yes, you can check your e-mails and post on Facebook now 🙂 Tell us you have started writing that overdue report!! ;-))

6. Repeat the above steps tomorrow.

7. Repeat the above steps again every working day until the project is done.

8. Congratulate yourself on accomplishment and celebrate the completion of the project with your favourite activity.

It seems so simple but it works magic. I’ve been following the above steps during this week, working just 30 min on creating that one table. The table is now complete, and I moved on to writing up the results.

The advice appeared to be very useful and timely to others as after posting a summary of it on Facebook I got some of my Facebook friends immediately replying with “thank you” and “gonna do that!”.

And that same friend who posted “Must. Stop. Procrastinating.” on her Facebook wall, completed her essay within that week, after following the steps similar to those outlined above.

I hope it will be useful to you, my reader 🙂

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