How to Motivate Yourself (Part 8)

A neat little trick is to use productive procrastination. This is a daily favourite of mine.

If you’re reading this series, it’s likely you’ve struggled with motivation for some time. In earlier parts, I examined tools that can you help you deal with the barriers to being motivated. Here are some of the tools to propel you into doing the things you want to do. If you’ve struggled with failure to launch and you’re slowly working up to being productive, you’re going to get good mileage from a productive procrastination list. As a side note, for those who struggle with digital and drug addictions, such as gaming, excessive porn, gambling, drugs and alcohol, its pretty common recovery symptom to find it difficult be productive towards middle and longer term goals.

Odds are, you’re pretty good at procrastinating, we’re all pretty good at it.

That’s fine, so everybody at some point has to figure out how to manage it. At some point, you would have discovered that having a “to do” list is a necessary part of being organised. In fact, it’s a fundamental skill to wake up in the morning, look at your list and figure out your day. If you’re not doing this, start making a “to do” list, and review it as a ritual every morning.

Okay, you have a list but you never get it done. First, make sure everything on the list is achievable for the day. Don’t put something that you can’t tick off, I’ll cover that in a later post. I use the app any.do to manage my today’s to do list. Good, you got a realistic to do list. But today you are feeling lazy, remember, feelings aren’t necessary for action. So you commit to doing the least unpleasant thing on the list.

Source: Tom Rogersen, Unsplash

I call this technique, productive procrastination.

Let’s face it, even if you break down several fear mountains (see skill 3) and put these actionable steps into your to do list, you still might get the feeling of weaselling out and disengaging. So you commit to yourself to doing the least unpleasant task on that list as your way to procrastinate. After you do that task, you repeat the exercise and commit to doing the least unpleasant task. By the end of the day, you’ll have only 1 task left but you’d accomplished 80-90 percent of what you had hoped to achieve. It’s also likely you have enough in the tank, for one last push.

You’ll be surprised at how useful this skill is when it’s a habit. You’ll automatically chip away at any list if this is your last resort. Even my most “lazy” days are productive. Over time, you’ll notice that your lazy and motivated days are similarly productive if you use this technique, the only difference is on motivated days you might tackle the most unpleasant tasks first.

So harness your natural tendency to procrastinate and lever it towards your to do list. You never knew that your world class procrastination skills could end up being productive after all.

Happy recovery.