Weeding procrastination – amp your productivity and drop aimless time wasting

Many people are really terrible at focusing on one task – especially with the added mass of interruptions now provided by a fast-paced technological world. The golden rewards of a laser-sharp focus seem to have been lost to the sands of time.

 

You’re probably “mutli-tasking” right now, how many browser tabs do you have open? How many are you flicking between? Could there be some tasks you've abandoned which you may not even go back to?

 

Are you eating? Watching a youtube vid? Listening to some mp3s? Maybe you’re in the middle of getting ready for work and you just decided to load up an internet browser and quickly read something.

 

Multi-tasking is a highly inefficient way of working your goals. When relaxation, recreation, and multi-facets of work mix together they create a mess. It’s disorganised, unclear where it’s going, and the end product of each facet tends to be of poor quality. This is new-procrastination in disguise. Computers encourage it.

 

Focus is an extremely high value ability. Consciously deciding to do something is a powerful thing to do, but consciously returning your focus to something when procrastination or a distraction tries to surface is the kind of beneficial habit which seperates in a given area someone who's pretty good from someone who's outstanding.

 

 

If you sat down to do something productive at this moment, how long would it be before you distract yourself? It’s very possible you don’t even know. Maybe you need to find out. Maybe you’re about to distract yourself right now.

 

Maybe you’re about to feel that all too familiar urge to check your gmail and your facebook and your phone and this and that even though you only just checked them all 5 minutes ago.

 

Most of you should know what I’m talking about now. Those little loops of wasted pointless time where you’re habitually doing nothing.

 

 

Procrastination adds up. I’d go far as to say that most people spend about 95% of their waking time unfocused, at least by my definition of focus. Wandering aimlessly from task to random bits of recreation.

 

It may even appear that you’re getting things done. But the quality of produce is poor, and the time it takes to do things is amplified by the lack of focus.

 

If you habitually enforce focus on the tasks which are really important to you, and separate recreation from productivity you will see a massive boost in your productivity, or if you want to see it another way, your success. Habitually enforcing a refocusing on productive tasks is one of the purest conscious actions you can take.

 

Not only that, by actively seperating your recreation away from your working time you can actually much more greatly enjoy your time. Rather than getting relatively minute hits of pleasure from a few wasted minutes distracting yourself, you can add up all that time throughout a day to make an hour or two extra time really letting loose and having fun.

 

 

Killing mindless attention wandering is harder than you might think. The first thing you need to do is assess how bad you might be at maintaining focus on a task. If I asked you right now to sit down and focus on a piece of work for 45 minutes, could you do it without finding interruptions?

 

How about if an interruption from the outside world came in, for example an e-mail notification popup or a new text message, would you ignore it and refocus on your task or would you indulge in the little bit of distraction the world has provided you?

 

Killing procrastination is not easy, but it’s worth it. Real focus is a rare and extremely valuable trait. Once you begin to cultivate it then you’ll create a snowball whereby you’ll realise the benefits of cultivated focus and will be greatly motivated to continue to weed out procrastination.

 

 

The next time you focus on a task be prepared to refocus when an interruption comes. You need to maintain a bit of self-awareness in order to do this – meditation can help with that if you don’t feel you have very much. Work on your task as normal, but when that procrastination habit kicks it, and it will do at some point, stop yourself and refocus on your task.

 

When I used to write articles as a freelance journalist several years ago I used to be terrible for getting distracted, After 10 minutes I would be flicking back to my internet browser, then I’d get up and make another coffee, then I’d go and buy some gum, then I’d look at the incomplete article for 2 minutes, then I’d go have a cigarette (back when I was a smoker), then I’d read a Wikipedia article, then I’d check my RSS feeds, and so on and so on.

 

What a horrible way to operate!

 

I recently took a look at some of my freelance journalism writing from a few years ago. It’s not only that it’s worse because my general skill level as a writer has improved, but that lack of focus actually shines horribly through. You can see clearly the lack of direction in those articles. They are shoddy, mangled together, paragraphs don’t fit together, the whole article doesn’t tell a smooth focused story…

 

Any lack of focus shows through in the final product. If you want to produce quality – you must resist procrastination and cultivate the ability to refocus.

 

Remember in the world of productivity there is nothing purer than stopping procrastination at its root and forcing yourself to refocus consciously on a task. You will actually experience a little surge of energy when you do this – that’s energy which would have gone to waste before, but now it’s contributing to your productivity and success.

 

If you go on living a life of random procrastination, that’s fine. But realise that now I’ve opened your eyes to this that if you do go and do that then you are choosing to live that life. You have no excuse any more if month after month you aren’t getting the things you want.

 

Otherwise, as from today, decide you’re going to create a habit of conscious refocus. You are going to have to fight this battle again and again, but each time it gets easier. Now you’re cultivating a rare and valuable habit the reward of which is a massive increase in quality, direction, and productivity.