I’m not saying, by this post, that I’m procrastination’s master and I never procrastinate anything. Believe me, I do all the time. I have championship procrastination days sometimes.
But I’m also pretty good at getting stuff done. I’ve completed two university degrees by distance learning (one undergraduate and one graduate), where I didn’t have set class times or an enforced schedule, just a deadline by which I had to have tests and assignments done. I’ve also gotten quite a bit of both fiction and non-fiction writing done in the last couple of years.
Again, that’s not to brag, just to show that I’ve developed some methods of getting stuff done over the last decade or so, and they work for me. They might work for you too (though they also might not), so I thought I’d share them, if you want to steal them (I’m ok with that).
I have two main tactics for getting stuff done; schedules and record keeping.
My schedule is fairly flexible, but I maintain several instances of “before I do <blank> I must do <blank>. For example, I check email daily, but I try to maintain the standard that I must sit down and write at least one page of fiction before I check my email that day. In other words, before I get involved in everything else that is out to get my attention, I have to get the fiction writing done. I usually don’t get fiction written that day, if I let myself check my email before sitting down to write.
The other thing is record keeping. In my day planner (I use a hard-copy one I got for two dollars at the dollar store) I track a number of things – the books I’ve read, the pages of fiction I’ve written, and the exercise sessions I’ve done. At the end of the week (or the beginning of the next) I look over the previous week, and I have what I have done all laid out for me. There’s no fudging or modifying memories, it’s recorded how much I’ve done, or not done. That record keeping keeps me accountable, and helps me get to the work because I don’t want to disappoint my future self, when I look back over this week.
There’s also a few other things I do. As I discussed last time, I set myself challenges, a playful competition with myself to see whether I can do something. This gives me a performance standard to keep.
I also don’t check social media more than once a day. There are a few social media platforms I’m active on, besides this blog – Tumblr, Facebook and Medium, mostly, but I have the rule that I don’t look at any of them more than once a day. They still can be something of a time suck, but the once a day rule means that I’m at least not constantly interrupting myself to look at them, something that is very disruptive for work that requires concentration, like writing. I’ll check email a little more often – two or three times a day, usually not more often than that.
And one of the more important things, I’ve found, is to be flexible and forgiving. Unexpected things come up, both good and bad, and I need to be able to adjust what I’m doing, be flexible in my thinking and my scheduling, to accommodate them.
I also have to be forgiving of myself, if I’m in a grouchy mood and get caught up in reading stuff online, and I never get to doing something I intended to, in a day. Or sometimes I sit down to write and the words feel like I’m dragging myself over broken glass to get them out. I get a sentence down, and then I got nothing. Bad days happen, I’ve learned I need to simply accept them as a bad day, and assume that tomorrow will be better.
So that’s a quick overview of how I (mostly) overcome procrastination and get stuff done. Feel free to use any of these tactics, if you think they’ll work for you. And let me know in the comments if you have any other method that you’ve found works for you, I’d be interested to hear.
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