3 Tricks to Help You Stop Procrastinating

You have a lot on your plate. But rather than get any of it done, you seek out distractions. If you find yourself procrastinating at work, this post has three tips to help you break this pattern.

Procrastination isn’t usually an issue of laziness or a lack of time-management skills. If we’re talking about chronic procrastination, psychologists suggest it’s an issue having more to do with self-regulation. It goes like this:

• You have an important task to do, be it big or small.
• You know that if you don’t do the task or get it done on time, it’s going to create a problem for you (and probably others as well).
• Yet, you willingly delay the task, knowing full well the consequences.
• The distractions you seek out feel good, but it’s only temporary.

In this post, we’re going to look at some of the reasons why people procrastinate and various tips and tricks you can do to push past it.

Why Do We Procrastinate?

According to Psychology Today:

“Everyone puts things off sometimes, but procrastinators chronically avoid difficult tasks and may deliberately look for distractions. Procrastination tends to reflect a person’s struggles with self-control. For habitual procrastinators, who represent approximately 20 percent of the population, ‘I don’t feel like it’ comes to take precedence over their goals or responsibilities, setting them on a downward spiral of negative emotions that further deters future effort.”

But why exactly do procrastinators not feel like it? There are a number of reasons.

For some, it’s the pressure to be perfect and the fear of failing to live up to that standard that keeps them from getting started.

For others, it’s because they perceive the task as being unenjoyable. So, they seek out something that will bring them joy, even temporarily.

Here are some other reasons why people may procrastinate:

• The task seems too big to handle.
• They see little or no reward in doing it.
• They’re confused about how to do the task.
• They feel overstimulated.
• They feel fatigued.

There are some mental health practitioners who suggest that there’s sometimes something else at play.

Dr. Alice Boyes, for instance, says that “batchers” are often confused for procrastinators. Batchers are people who prefer to complete a set of tasks in a way that maximizes their productivity.

There are seven types. These are the ones most relevant to designers and developers:

1. The time-based batcher waits to do certain tasks at specific times of the day instead of the second they hit their plate.
2. The volume-based batcher waits until they’ve accumulated enough tasks and then cranks them out all at once.
3. The pressure-based batcher waits until they’re closer to the delivery date (just not too close to miss it).
4. The context-based batcher waits until their physical environment is ideal (like the kids going to bed at night).
5. The identity-based batcher waits until a pre-determined time when they work in that capacity (like doing onboarding only on Mondays, wireframes on Tuesday, etc.)

For some procrastinators, it’s not about being irresponsible and delaying a task that needs to get done. It’s that they have a preferred work method that only resembles procrastination.

3 Tricks to Help Prevent Procrastination

Procrastination can feel good in the moment, though many people realize deep down inside the consequences won’t feel very good. Here are some of the consequences that can result from procrastination:

• You wait until the last minute, forcing other critical tasks to go on the backburner.
• You rush through the task, delivering it with errors, bugs, inconsistencies or other quality issues.
• You feel stressed and overwhelmed, which leaves you in a heightened state of aggravation the rest of the day.
• You miss your deadline. Your boss or client is displeased with you, which may keep you from better opportunities or advancements down the road.
• You regularly procrastinate, which inevitably leads to sleepless nights, health issues and burnout.

If you’re worried you’re headed down this path, here are some tricks you can use to stop procrastinating:

1. Use a Task Management Tool

There are a couple of issues that can be resolved by using a project-management tool to schedule your tasks.

Let’s say your boss calls you up and tells you they need a landing page built by Friday for a new Facebook ad campaign. You’ve got it on your mind all week, but you keep dragging your feet. You hate building landing pages and would rather focus on maintaining and updating their website.

There’s a big difference between knowing you have a task to do versus seeing it on a timeline or task list in front of you. That said, you might still feel a sense of pressure whenever you see this looming task.

What may help is having a tool that allows you to create an actionable and fully editable plan for the day, week and month ahead.

My suggestion is to find a scheduler that:

Allows You to Plan Your Days Down to the Hour

Instead of just adding a three-hour task to build the landing page, you can set aside specific hours when you know you will be ready and able to get it done.

Everyone’s most productive hours are different. If you haven’t found yours yet, spend some time looking into it so you can schedule different kinds of tasks when you’re mentally and energetically up to the challenge.

Comes with Drag-and-Drop Capabilities

If you’re not feeling up to a certain task but it’s up next on your schedule, simply drag it to a new time slot where you can reasonably tackle it.

This is why I love calendar-based time management tools. When you can see the whole week or even month ahead, and your deadlines are clearly marked, you can shift things around to suit how you’re feeling in that moment.

Enables You to Build in Free Time or Buffers

If you’re filling your schedule to the brim every day with no wiggle room, it’s going to make any level of procrastination worse. So, give yourself some breathing room.

For instance, I give myself a two-hour break in the middle of every work day. I don’t have to use it all. But just having it on the calendar gives me the grace to work when I’m up to the task instead of wasting my time on social media, Reddit, etc.

Allows You to Check Off Tasks as You Finish Them

The physical (or digital) act of checking an item off a task list releases a hit of dopamine.

One of the reasons why procrastinators seek out distractions is to activate their pleasure center. By setting up your task manager to create a similar sensation (and one that comes with rewards in the end instead of consequences), it may become addictive in a positive way.

2. Make the Task Smaller

A lot of times, it’s the size of the task that intimidates people and leads them to procrastinate. For example, let’s say you’re building a design system for a new app you’re working on. You’re dreading the task because of how long or complex it’s been in the past. You have a six-hour block on your calendar to get it done and you keep pushing it back.

10:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.: CREATE DESIGN SYSTEM FOR CLIENT A

So, how about this?

Look at your deadline. Do you have some time before it needs to be done? Great. Then rather than set aside six hours (or however long you think it’ll take), create a 15-minute task for your next free moment:

10:00 a.m. - 10:15 a.m.: Duplicate design system for Client X and save to Client A folder

Create a copy of the design system from the previous job, and save it in the project folder you’re currently working on. While you’re in there, update the basic client details so you don’t have to worry about it later.

Not ready to do more right now? That’s fine. Add a new 30-minute task to your schedule when you have the time, energy or focus:

3:30 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.: Swap out colors in design system for Client A’s

You can do this with the remainder of the steps required to finish the overarching task.

For a lot of procrastinators, this approach can make difficult or time-consuming tasks feel more manageable. So long as you keep an eye on that deadline, you can make these small, incremental steps toward completing the whole task over time instead of all at once.

3. Cut Down on Your Decision-making

There’s a UX Law called Choice Overload. It states that:

“Overchoice or choice overload is the paradoxical phenomenon that choosing between a large variety of options can be detrimental to decision making processes.”

We see this in UX design all the time. When you give users far too many choices to make or too many options to choose from, some of them just decide it’s best to make no choice at all.

How does this play into procrastination?

Let’s say you have four web development projects you’re working on this month. They’re all at varying stages. You look at the calendar for today and see the following tasks:

• 1-hour kickoff call with Client B
• 30-minute weekly check-in with team
• 3 separate 30-minute user testing sessions to moderate for Client A
• 2 hours of market research for Client C
• 3 hours of user persona development for Client D
• 32 unread emails
• 11 unread Slack messages

The first three you have to do. The problem is, they’re scattered haphazardly throughout the day. So, trying to get the market research and user persona work done in one single stretch is going to be hard. You tell yourself you’d much rather do that work than check your messages, but you just can’t get started.

Those unread messages are weighing on you. You know that checking them would be the quickest thing to do and it wouldn’t be a big deal if they get disrupted by the calls or user testing sessions. However, you know they might add more work (and possibly stress) to your plate.

So, what do you do?

The more brainpower you expend on “What should I do next?” or “How do I avoid this task I’m dreading,” the more energy you’re sapping away from work you need to do. The best thing is to reduce the number of decisions you have to make.

When it comes to managing tasks, you can do this by having dedicated hours for when you do certain things, like the time-based batcher method mentioned above.

For example, you might hold space on your calendar every day from 8:00 to 8:30 a.m. and again from 4:30 to 5:00 p.m. to check messages. By doing this, the 32 emails and 11 Slack messages no longer become something you have to contend with when figuring out what to do next.

Another thing you could do is set rules for when you can be scheduled and for what kinds of tasks. For instance, you could have dedicated days for meetings and calls. What’s more, you could restrict those calls to a set timeframe, like between 9:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. This way, your calls wouldn’t be spread out all over the place, making it challenging to get larger tasks done.

Wrapping Up

We procrastinate because we anticipate some sort of discomfort or displeasure at performing a task. It could be that we believe the task will be too hard, that we won’t be able to do a good job or that it’ll bore our brains out.

Some people turn toward distractions that temporarily pause those feelings that have arisen. The only problem is that the joy and relief that come from those distractions are not long-lasting. What’s more, procrastination can exacerbate the consequences of not doing the task when you had initially planned to.

Rather than get stuck with this kind of habit whenever you feel the urge to not do something, train yourself to develop new habits. Schedule all your tasks, but allow yourself the flexibility to move things around as needed. Break up bigger tasks into smaller steps to reduce overwhelm. And come up with rules so you’re not having to expend so much mental energy on what to work on and when.