5 Techniques to Prevent Procrastination

(That are super effective!)

We all know that procrastination kills our productivity, no matter where we work, whether that’s from home, a coffee shop, or even the office.

Everyone has a time where we’ purposefully distract ourselves, rather than starting a task, whether that’s checking our Facebook page for X time that day.

Browsing through our favourite RSS aggregator (Ours is Feedly) to see if any new stories have come up.

Even just staring at the wall, getting ourselves psyched or bored enough to begin working on the next task.

We all do it, (some of us worse than others), for a multitude of different reasons:

• We’re disorganised

• Fear of failure

• Think we’ll do better under pressure

• Lack of motivation

• Lack of focus

But there are a few procrastination preventing techniques we can employ to keep them to a minimum.

1. Work somewhere else

When working from home, there are steps we can take to help our productivity.

However, if we find a time where we keep procrastinating, try work somewhere else.

There are a multitude of distractions at home such as TV, pets, chores around the house, by working from elsewhere, we can remove these distractions.

Go to a library, co-working space, a coffee shop, somewhere with less distractions and help us focus our minds on the task at hand.

2. Make it more manageable

One way to motivate ourselves to do work is by looking at the big picture, what the final outcome will be.

But this can also be a problem, especially if it’s a big task, it can be a bit daunting when we think the amount of work that needs to be put in.

What we can do however, is break this down into smaller, more manageable tasks, take this blog ford example.

It didn’t happen in one go, e broke it down into smaller stages:

1. Research and planning — decide on the topic then research the details.

2. Write it — create the content (for longer pieces we may break it down into different sections)

3. Edit what we’ve written — likelihood is, our first draft isn’t going to be perfect.

4. Finishing and posting — finish it up by adding some images, links, quotes etc. then posting.

By doing this, we can concentrate on each task, without being overwhelmed and seeing no end in sight.

3. Reward our success

Reward ourselves for reaching milestones (this goes along with breaking things down into smaller tasks).

Rewarding ourselves throughout the day, when certain milestones are met can help create learned behaviour, where we associate accomplishment and happiness from the reward.

It helps us spur ourselves on, giving us something to strive for at the end of each milestone.

It also helps make our jobs more enjoyable along the way, and isn’t that what we want, something we enjoy doing

4. Put deadlines in place

Put some pressure on ourselves to ensure we are working to reach milestones, don’t meet a deadline, no reward (see, this all ties in together).

This creates urgency for us to start and complete milestones, and helps prevent us from putting them off indefinitely.

5. Get the hard parts out of the way

We want to work on the hard tasks when we’re are freshest and have the most energy, for the majority of people, this is in the morning.

Working on more complex milestones first, means we’re more likely to complete them.

Later during the day we start to lag and have less energy, making it much more likely that we’ll procrastinate from getting started on the more difficult tasks.

Procrastinating affects us all at some point, but take these hacks to heart, and you’ll be able to

What are the ways you stop procrastination? We’d love to read them in the comments!