Overcome procrastination with 10 incredibly powerful strategies (Part 1)

Are you reading this instead of working? Not to worry! This is one of those times when procrastination can be positive. If you want to overcome procrastination and start achieving your goals, then these strategies are for you.

In Part 1 and 2, we’ll focus on strategies to overcome procrastination that address its root causes. So, read on and then get to work.

#1 Find your fundamental why

Identifying your fundamental why will get you out of bed in the morning. It will make you sit down and write. It will make you close your browser tabs and open your stats app when the last thing you want to do is think about is your messy data. Your fundamental why is a powerful thing, and it will provide fuel when there is no gas in the tank.

So, what’s your fundamental why? Let me give you a hint. It’s not because you have to pay bills. It’s also not likely to be the first thing that popped into your head. It’s most likely buried far beneath a bunch of external drivers like meeting other people’s expectations and deadlines. Your fundamental why is very much an internal driver, and you’ll probably have to dig deep to find it.

To find your fundamental why, you don’t need anything except a pen, paper, and some time. Do yourself a favor and do this old school. Put away the screen and get a pen that feels nice in your hand. There is something important about putting pen to paper. Once you have your pen and paper, find a quiet spot where you won’t be disturbed or distracted and give yourself about half an hour or so to dig for your fundamental why.

Write out a big goal that you want to achieve at the top of the paper. Underneath, write one word—why? As the answer forms in your mind, write it down. Don’t censor or edit yourself. Whatever answer comes, just write it down.

This answer is not your fundamental why. You have to go deeper to find it. Below your first answer, write why again. Your answer to the second why is also not your fundamental why. Do it again. As you go deeper, you will uncover a lot about yourself, and you will get closer to your fundamental why. When you have repeated the process about 7–10 times, your answer will stop changing. This is your fundamental why.

Your fundamental why is the fuel that never runs out. It is what you can always rely on to move you forward. Whenever you feel stuck, your fundamental why will help you move. Most people have not yet identified or acknowledged their fundamental why and depend on external drivers to avoid procrastination. Now that you know yours, use it freely and often. There is no limit to what it can do for you.

#2 Eliminate parseltasks

You have a personal limit to the amount of work you can undertake without feeling overwhelmed. When you operate past this threshold for enough time, your anxiety will build and can trigger procrastination. In these cases, you procrastinate to regulate your mood. Unfortunately, procrastinating to boost your mood has the inevitable downside of producing the opposite outcome. When you have to face the reality of the work that still has to get done, you are likely to become overwhelmed and triggered once more.

Let’s consider a scenario in which you are a doctorate student who is overwhelmed because you have a lab presentation in a month, corrections for your paper due in three weeks, a call for a postdoc position that closes in two weeks, a field trip to plan for the summer along with what feels like a million and one administrative tasks that are attached to it, and data to organize and analyze. Each day, your to-do list grows, and you feel more and more anxious. Eventually, you find that you are not advancing as you would like and you start procrastinating. 

In the short term, boosting your mood by procrastinating actually does help you feel less anxious. Don’t judge yourself for it. You found a way to deal with your anxiety. However, the moral hangover that follows will more often than not lead to more anxiety and can even create feelings of depression, both of which trigger procrastination. The resulting loop is messy and difficult to break. To get out of this oxymoronic mood-boosting yet anxiety-inducing procrastination loop, you need to create and build momentum.

You do this by clearing your slate and creating a task hierarchy for your most urgent time-bound goal while ignoring all others. Think of a horse pulling a carriage on a busy, anxiety-inducing street. It doesn’t take much for the horse to become overwhelmed by all the information pouring in from all its senses. The solution to this problem is blinders, which force the horse to only pay attention to the information that it needs to get the job done. You will need to do the same.

For the purposes of this post, tasks are actions that you must complete to accomplish a goal. A time-bound goal is one with an external deadline that you have no control over. The tasks that serve this goal are more important than any others. While you break free of the loop, only consider the tasks related to your most urgent time-bound goal. In the hypothetical student scenario above, the most urgent time-bound goal is the call for the postdoc position.

Evaluate the tasks on your plate and determine which are actually needed to complete your only goal and which are just filling up space—what is the steak and what is useless parsley, a parseltask, if you will. Any parseltasks need to go. In the hypothetical student scenario, parseltasks will be actions like responding to emails, ordering supplies for the field trip, including more citations in the paper, and learning how to use an R package.

After eliminating all parseltasks, you will be left with only a few tasks that are actually going to move the needle. You’ll feel a weight slide off your shoulders and a surge of energy. Now, use that energy to do the smallest task on your list and then the second smallest. Keep building momentum, and you’ll be out of the loop. Use the same strategy to accomplish your next goal.

#3 Get up early and create your own morning routine

I would argue that nothing is more important to set yourself up for a productive day than a morning routine. As you now know, breaking procrastination loops is about building momentum. It should come as no surprise that avoiding procrastination altogether is about building healthy, sustainable momentum day after day. This starts with the right morning routine.

When I refer to a morning routine, I am not referring to the actions you take to get out of the house on time, like brushing your teeth or eating breakfast. A morning routine is a set of practices that align your thoughts, intentions, feelings, and actions throughout the day.

A morning routine might only consist of half an hour of journaling, or it might also include exercise. Morning routines can include writing out your intentions for the day or checking in with your goals. Many morning routines also include meditation, reflection, and reading. Each morning routine will vary from person to person. You will probably need to try a few different routines before creating one that works for you. Be honest with what you want and need. If something doesn’t serve you, it’s not necessary to include it in your morning routine. Your morning routine must be sustainable.

If you begin each day without a morning routine, you are subject to the requirements of others from the moment you get up and start rushing to beat the clock. Without a morning routine, you will be more likely to succumb to the idea of “good days” and “bad days,” and it will be easier to procrastinate. You’ll find that it is much easier to continue acting with intention throughout the day if you begin your day with an intentional morning routine.

Regardless of what you choose to include in your morning routine, it should leave you feeling optimistic, energized, and ready to interact with whatever the day brings. A morning routine will make it much easier to manage challenges and setbacks throughout the day and to accomplish the tasks you set for yourself without succumbing to procrastination.

#4 Support conscientiousness with a website and app blocker

Conscientiousness is one of the big five personality traits. Some of the most defining characteristics of conscientiousness, such as self-control, industriousness, persistence, organization, self-discipline, punctuality, and goal-focused achievement, are often defined as the opposites of procrastination, which is essentially a self-regulatory failure.¹ Procrastination and conscientiousness are thus fundamentally linked.

Knowing this, you can adopt and incorporate strategies that support and encourage conscientiousness and simultaneously limit procrastination when working on your computer. One of the easiest ways to do so is to forcibly eliminate distractions on your devices. First, turn off notifications on your phone. Then, install and activate a blocker for websites and/or apps on your computer.

A blocker is just what it sounds like. It will prevent you from opening things on your computer that will allow you to procrastinate. Some blockers are only for websites, while others can be used for both websites and apps. Most blockers also allow you to customize what you block and when you block it, which is quite handy. There are many options available, and one will surely meet your needs.

LeechBlock is a free website blocker that will work with most browsers, while Limit is a great option for Chrome. If you’re a Mac user, check out SelfControl for one of the strictest website blockers available. Beware, it means business. If you’re looking for a more comprehensive blocking option that will block both websites and apps on your computer, you’ll need to sign up for a subscription to a tool like Freedom or Cold Turkey, both of which work with Windows and macOS.

#5 A daily to-do list with accompanying intentions

If you’re trying to get anything done, chances are you have a to-do list. If you procrastinate, chances are that your to-do lists don’t get done as often as you would like. You may actually begin to resent them if they only serve to remind you of what you have not yet finished. Through my own morning routine, I developed a habit that has become the backbone of my productivity system. This one small thing has made all the difference, and I hope it serves you as well.

As I was developing my morning routine, I found that the most vital component was to write down my intentions for the day. Specifically, how did I want to show up for the people in my life, what did I want to remember and appreciate throughout the day, and what values did I want to focus on embodying? I realized how critical it was to write down my intentions on the days when I neglected to do so. On these days, I was less productive, more distracted, and generally less pleasant to be around. I quickly understood that writing out the answers to these questions every morning would guarantee that my day went relatively smoothly, even when stressful situations arose. I had discovered a secret to being content and productive.

On the days when I neglected my morning routine, I found that I still wanted to write down my intentions before beginning work. It had become that important to me. At the time, I was using a small blank notebook for my daily to-do lists. I would write down the tasks on the right-hand side of the notebook each day, and on the left-hand side, I began to write out my intentions. It turned out that I stumbled onto something quite powerful. By including my intentions next to my tasks, I was able to easily start and finish each task without the temptation to procrastinate. Eventually, this practice became essential to accomplishing my goals.

Each time I sit down to work, I write out my intentions on the left-hand side of my daily agenda. Only after I have finished, do I move on to writing out my tasks on the right. If you want to try this out for yourself, always begin with your intentions and then move on to your tasks and maintain the left-right separation. Your intentions cannot occupy the same space as your tasks, and they are written first. If you do this for a week, you may find that this small practice will come to change everything about how you approach your work and your life.

Use the strategies that work for you

It is absolutely possible to overcome procrastination without relying on the stress of deadlines to get you moving. The trick is finding what works for you. Be honest with what is working and what is not and identify what you need to get things done. We are not all the same, and some strategies will serve you more than others. Don’t force things. Find what works for you.

Be sure to check Part 2 for five additional and practical strategies that will get you moving in the right direction.

References

¹ Steel P (2007) “The Nature of Procrastination: A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review of Quintessential Self-Regulatory Failure,” Psychological Bulletin 133(1): 65–94 DOI: 10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65

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