For those of us who have been known to leave difficult or unwanted tasks until the last possible minute, looking at those tasks as opportunities and the deadline as a “window of opportunity” can make us get into gear. This will force you to make the decisions that need to be made and get to work confident in the knowledge that when the “launch” is over you’ll have breathing room to tackle something else.
Procrastination gets a bad rap, likely because we use it in excess. Putting too many things off is a problem, but the opposite isn’t necessarily much better. Last year I managed to completely eradicate procrastination from my life, only to learn that it has its purpose. Sometimes putting things off until tomorrow is the healthiest choice you can make. Here’s why.
Nothing’s better than sinking your teeth into a satisfying after-hours side project. But after 10 hours at work, it’s not always easy to muster the energy to switch off your TV and get to work. The trick I use is simple, self-evident, and it works: Getting started is everything.
I’ve long been overwhelmed by an unwieldy list of goals that would sit, unaccomplished, in a long-term to-do list year after year. Then I came across a simple trick that solved my chronic problem. As gimmicky as it may sound, I’m now accomplishing everything I’d been putting off in just an hour a day. Here’s how you can, too.
Yesterday’s post about useful iPad apps for students stirred up lots of interesting discussion, including debates over whether a tablet was a better choice for a student than a notebook PC. But there’s one thread in the conversation I do take issue with: the idea that you shouldn’t have any form of technology at a lecture, because you’ll only get distracted.
Author Clay Johnson finished his new book, The Information Diet, after a month of intense focus. The “super secret weapon” that got him to done? Slow bandwidth.
When we procrastinate, we’re simply making excuses to ourselves to justify why we’re not going to do what we need to do. CD Baby founder and human encyclopedia of useful life lessons Derek Sivers has a handy hack: just alter the language of your excuses by replacing “and” with “or”.
When I did the NaNoWriMo challenge last year, I found that I didn’t benefit much from specialised writing tools. But if you need an incentive to keep pumping out words, Written Kitten might do the trick. For every 100 words you type, you get a fresh picture of a cat.
I suck at Photoshop. For years, I’ve posted ugly images alongside Lifehacker posts because I’m not a designer, and whenever I put a little effort into composing an image to go along with a post, it never magically looked incredible. The reality: I was lazy. I may never be Massimo Vignelli, but that doesn’t mean I should remain a design idiot my entire life.
Developer Jakub Stastny had a problem with organising his day for ages. Never-ending TODO lists led to frustration and consequently to procrastination; exhaustion from context switching; the feeling that he wasn’t accomplishing anything. A few weeks ago he had a breakthrough, and he calls it the 3 + 2 rule.
