How To Beat Procrastination And Distraction With A Stopwatch

If you often find yourself unable to start a task a remain focused, you’re not alone, but you may just be able to trick yourself into avoiding the problem with nothing more than a stopwatch.

Photo by Julian Lim

Productivity blog WorkAwesome suggests using a stopwatch (which can be anything from your phone’s timer to this web site) to stay on top of your tasks. You just follow four steps to get the job done:

• Write out the specifics of each task you need to accomplish.
• Assign each task a time limit and don’t worry about getting it right—just estimate.
• Don’t watch the clock once you start the timer.
• When the timer goes off, figure out if you can finish the task quickly and give yourself that amount of time to finish it (without the stopwatch).

The idea is this: if you run out of time and believe you can finish quickly, the far-off end to the task won’t be looming over your head as you struggle to begin. Setting time limits gives a definite end to the task, and letting yourself exceed those time limits by a small amount lets you tell yourself that you’re almost done and you can finish. If you find that you can’t finish a certain task, just move on to another and schedule more time later, repeating the process. Some things will take longer than you expect, but for the most part you should be able to effectively schedule and finish your tasks in (approximately) the allotted time.

Beat Procrastination With a Stopwatch [Work Awesome]