Procrastination is an art form that I’ve spent a lifetime perfecting. I’m convinced that everyone can procrastinate in their lives while still accomplishing great things. Of course, that’s going to require that you use procrastination as the food for a goblin I’m going to call “stress-induced hyper-productivity.” More on that later.
Let’s boil this down to a few easy steps. I’ll use two lists here so that you can leave whenever you have the answer you need. First, how to procrastinate, and second, how to procrastinate AND still get things done.
How to Procrastinate:
- Wait to do things. Especially things that are important.
- Keep waiting. It’s going to feel uncomfortable. That’s how you know the procrastination is working.
- Use distractions. Since you’re waiting anyway, you may as well be doing things that you like. Here are a few mini ideas to get you started:
- Take a walk if you’re into “nature” or “breathing”
- Watch a streaming service like Netflix. It’s not an endless black hole, so you’ll have to find something else to do eventually, but it’s good for a straight 4-year diversion, more if you’re willing to either take bathroom breaks or switch subscriptions after 4-years. (The 4-year timeline is not made up. Check out this excellent article from whats-on-netflix for that breakdown)
- Listen to heavy metal or screamo if you’re into “rage”, “confusion”, or “screaming”
- Use social media for the same reasons you might like heavy metal or screamo
And that’s it – everything you need to know about how to procrastinate!
“But Jason,” you might be saying, “I was promised ‘winning’ along with the procrastination.”
Erm… it was less of a “promise” and more of an “insinuation,” but fine. In an effort to avoid making a click-bait title, the rest of this post will be about procrastinating AND winning.
How to Procrastinate AND Still Win
- Follow all of the steps listed above
- Let the feelings of “discomfort” mentioned above turn into fairly significant (but not unhealthy) stress
- Feed the stress to the “stress-induced-hyper-productivity” goblin
- Experience winning
Many of you, like past me, are probably thinking to yourselves that steps 3 and 4 are difficult at best, and “never have happened to me literally ever” at worst. The rest of this post is dedicated to helping you create super-efficient work cycles that will lead to better work in a shorter time to achieve massive accomplishment.
Set Up a Game Plan for your Project with a Realistic Timeline
Procrastination combined with winning can only work when you ensure that you’re leaving just enough time at the very end to get everything done. There are several timeline quotas that are important to understand, so let’s review each one:
- The Edge of Do-Ability
- Enough Rope to Hang Yourself
- The Gooey Center
The Edge of Do-Ability
This is where the project in question is technically possible, but very likely not realistic or feasible. Let me give you an example. Say that you had to put together a 10-page, double-spaced, 2,500-word report for work (my grade school teachers always seemed to think this is a regular occurrence in the workplace, but I don’t think I’ve ever encountered this scenario once in the “real world”). The report is due Friday night at 11:59. If you can type at a consistent 50 words per minute the report would take you:
2,500 words / 50 wpm = 50 minutes
So in theory you could start work at 11:09 and be done by 11:59. Unrealistic? Probably, because you need to save the document and email the report. That might take as much as 1 minute, so you’re probably safer to start at 11:08.
Oh, unrealistic because of literally any other reason? OK, that’s fair.
This is exactly how I would write college papers, and exactly the math I’d use to figure out how much time I’d need. I’d usually write about half of the paper in the first 90% of the time and the second half in the last 10% of the time. I’d often get feedback from professors like “great start” and “wait, what happened at the end here?”
The results were surprisingly good, or maybe even, embarrassingly good, especially given how little time was spent on the project. But the results were never great. A bit more time would help deliver a better result.
Enough Rope to Hang Yourself
As the name of this time window implies, there’s such a thing as too much time. This is because of the predictable reaction that the human brain has when given a project with an extremely long deadline.
Suppose your boss gives you a research project that she says is very important, and that she wants “done right” (if you ever figure out what this actually means, please let me know). Because it’s such an important and large project, she gives you 6 months to get it done. How do you react?
“Oh great, I have tons of time then!”
You breathe a sigh of relief because 6 months from now might as well be never. That’s the danger right there. When will you start the project (if you ever do)? Probably 6 months from now, minus a day or two. This horrific “Enough Rope” timeline may as well be an “Edge of Do-Ability” timeline.
This timeline can actually end up being worse than an “Edge of Do-Ability” scenario. This is because of that nagging thought in the back of your brain saying, “Oh, we’ve got time.” This will frequently lead to going past the edge of possible. The result is an ask for more time, a partially completed report, excuses, etc.
The Gooey Center
For my sake, as well as yours, I tried multiple times to come up with a better term for this window of time. Right now I’m telling myself that it’s “good enough” with reasons like, “it’s memorable” and “it’s not that bad.” In any case, here we are. The Gooey Center.
The Gooey Center is where you have enough time to get the job done right, but not so much time that you enter the “I’ve got more time” mindset. In practice, it’s surprisingly much closer to the “edge of do-ability” than it is to the “enough rope to hang yourself” deadline. This is the sweet spot and is what you should be aiming for when you’re trying to get things done in a hurry.
A good rule of thumb for finding the gooey center is “edge of do-ability” rounded up and multiplied by 3, plus the time it takes to put together an outline (no more than about 20% of the time to do the actual work). This helps ensure you have some extra time in the end for some review/revision work. From our earlier example of writing a 10-page report for work, this would be:
1 hour (rounded up from 50 minutes) * 3 + 30 minute outline = 3.5 hours
Keep in mind that this is all going to be relative to your skillset, and can be broken down over several sessions. The only strong recommendations I’d make are to do the outline in a separate session from the other work and to not divide the work up into too many sessions.
Side note: you can actually create an artificial deadline to get things done ahead of time. Of course, that avoids procrastination, but maybe you're looking to "procrastinate less" or "get more done."
Don’t Skip the Outline
The only thing that makes this all possible is creating an outline of the project before you start. I resisted making outlines for years because I always viewed them as extra work. Eventually, a friend told me that I was doing it wrong and that if I wanted to maximize my laziness, an outline would actually help me save time. So I gave it a try, and immediately cut down the time it took me to do projects in half.
Why an outline? An outline makes order out of the chaos so that when it comes time to work you can focus on getting work done rather than brainstorming, generating ideas, being creative, etc. In other words, deciding how you’re going to do the work and actually doing the work are two vastly different contexts, and there’s a very real cost to switching contexts. If you don’t create an outline, you’re constantly switching back and forth between “doing” and “thinking.” This wastes a lot of time, as it’s very difficult and time-consuming for our brains to make the swap. In the future I’ll link to a post I’ll write about how to write good outlines quickly.
The Stress-Induced-Hyper-Productivity Goblin (TM, to my knowledge, not pending)
As its name implies the stress-induced-hyper-productivity goblin feeds off of stress. Unfortunately, if you don’t feed it “right” (it’s a picky eater) it also likes to eat happiness and dreams.
Here are the important steps to making sure the Goblin eats your stress and gives you success, instead of eating your dreams and happiness: the steps to being able to procrastinate and still be effective:
- Get everything organized ahead of time – see the above sections on making sure you have the right timeline and that you have an outline ready to go. If possible, get any necessary research done before you start
- Move to a dedicated environment for getting things done – typically a couch or bed is not a good option, and ideally, you would be in an environment that is conducive to the type of work you need to get done
- Remove all distractions – all games, unrelated books, electronics, maybe the interwebs, and even (and especially) your phone should be moved to another room. If you’re worried about missing a true emergency, you could put your phone on silent except phone calls, and have it loud enough that you can hear from the next room
- Feed the goblin with everything you got – or, in other words, get to work and don’t hold back, with hyper-productive work sessions. Use the stress and the impending timeline to fuel your work, and stay on task.
The stress-induced-hyper-productivity Goblin can sense fear, hesitation, over-thinking, re-thinking, daydreaming, napping, snacking, and distracted… being. Distractedfulness? Any one of these can lead to running out of time, a situation in which the Goblin will definitely eat your happiness and dreams instead. He’s hungry.
In the next section, I’m going to briefly discuss some approaches to step #4 to be productive while working.
Hyper-Productive Work Sessions
I’ll offer a number of suggestions to help you ensure your work session is as productive as possible:
- Start – dive right into the work, and start with what you know
- Follow the outline – you did the creative work ahead of time, so now is the time to focus on implementing your plan
- Focus on the requirements – make sure the requirements are done first before you start work on the polish
- First focus on quantity – it’s far easier (and better) to slim down the amount of content than to “fluff” it up more
- Keep a side idea bucket – you’ll likely have distracting ideas pop up throughout the work, some helpful and directly applicable and others not so much. Keep a side idea bucket where you can quickly dump ideas and continue with your work. In the review stage, you may need to come back to this for more (or better) content
- Aim to finish the first draft quickly – if you finish the first draft in a quarter or third of the time allotted then you’ll have a lot more time to review and revise (which is actually what generally makes the outcome look good)
For example, let’s say that you have to put together a 20 slide powerpoint presentation for work reporting on a proposal for a new feature in the software. You’ve allotted yourself 2 hours for the project. Here’s a good flow for how that work might be structured:
Minutes 0-10: As you begin work, you refer to your outline and immediately create the 4 types of slides you know you’ll need: title/conclusion slide, data slide, text slide, and screenshot slide. Don’t worry about how it looks.
Minutes 11-30: Data dump. Here you’ll take all of the data from your past research (charts, screenshots, graphs, etc.) and dump it into slides. You’ll order these roughly in a way that seems logical. Aim for having more than enough slides, maybe 25-30. Keep not worrying about how it looks.
Minutes 31-90: Combine slides that have similar themes, and get rid of data that is superfluous. Edit the presentation down to the required 20 slide amount (hopefully your company doesn’t actually have a specific required slide amount, if they do, I’m sorry). Check spelling and grammar if you haven’t done so yet. Reorder the slides (if necessary) to make the most logical sense and present a natural flow. Worry about how it looks. Move items on the page, resize, change colors, etc.
Minutes 90-120: Re-read everything so that you’re familiar with it, and so that you can make sure the order makes sense. Make any final changes.
By focusing on the things that are requirements (i.e. the data) rather than the nice-to-haves (i.e. pretty colors and stock photos) if you run out of time, you’ll still have something acceptable to present. Too many of us procrastinators like to wait until the last minute, and then start with the things that don’t matter because they’re more “fun” or we want the project to look like it wasn’t thrown together at the last minute. Remember that the goal is to accomplish the actual project, not to try to trick yourself and others into thinking that you’re on top of things. The tricking should be a side-effect, rather than the direct goal.
Experiencing “Winning”
This is hard to define because “winning” means different things for different people, and can have various wait times until payoff depending on the task performed.
For example, let’s say that the task that you performed was physical exercise. Does it feel like winning when you’re tired, sore, sweaty, and out of breath?
…“No”.
… the correct answer is “no” (if you answered yes to this, you probably identify as a “runner” in which case you and I have nothing in common and probably can’t be friends). But it will feel like winning if you keep it up long enough and get in great shape, have more energy, are healthier overall, etc.
If the short-term payoff isn’t worth it to you, but you believe the long-term payoff is worth it to you, consider tricking yourself by adding fake short-term payoffs. Using our physical exercise example, you could reward yourself after a workout with a good-tasting protein shake (while milkshakes do contain some protein, they don’t count here) or an extra hour of your favorite non-productive activity.
Once you start experiencing the “winning” that you were trying to achieve, you may find that you want to do more things that help you win even more. Don’t be alarmed! This can be a normal side effect of getting things done.
And Maybe then You’ll Even Stop Procrastinating
These feelings of accomplishment might even lead to something you never imagined possible: less procrastination and more accomplishment. I mean, allegedly. I’ll let you know if that happens to me, maybe if I get around to it.