Many, many years ago, I spoke about Procrastination to a small group of 17 dissertation students at a major university. The group was polite, attentive, and eager to learn.
Mid-presentation I spontaneously asked the group how many of the 17 were doing their work on a daily basis. I don't know why, but I was shocked by their response.
Only one of the 17 dissertation students was dealing with her work on a daily basis. When I asked her what made her behave differently from the rest of the group, she told me and the group that the university, due to a change in guidelines regarding financial support of doctoral students, was taking away her financial backing.
Ah-ha. There was all of a sudden a very large motivating force compelling that student to work on a daily basis.
Although I was shocked by the fact that 16 out of the 17 students were not working every day, I shouldn't have been. Why? Because I too, had developed 9,000,001 techniques to avoid working on my dissertation when I was in that very difficult emotional zone of dissertation writing.
Since that talk I gave many, many years ago, I have developed the opinion that the only way to push a humongous project (like a dissertation) through to the end is to work on it in a serious manner every day.
I am sharing these memories with you in order to encourage you to develop a daily habit with the project that is most important to you, and perhaps the one which is making you Procrastinate the most. Why should we waste valuable time when we know the answer to faster and greater productivity? We'll have way more fun when we are finished (as every single dissertation student who has ever successfully completed a dissertation will attest).
The following are a few guidelines and reflections to get you started:
1. You need to be able to distinguish real work from fake work. When we have in-depth, complex projects to handle, it is easy to manufacture a sense of doing the work, when in fact, we are just passing time. Make sure you are honest with yourself about whether you are actually focusing on your work, or if you are researching and fussing your way around it.
2. Even 15 minutes a day of real work will be beneficial to your overall productivity. If the idea of working on something every day makes you cringe, know that just 15 minutes a day of real work will give you tremendous payoffs at the end of the day.
3. You will not have to deal with initiation stress as much. So often the issue with getting down to work is the problem of needing to get past our discomfort with initiating our work. Once you get into a pattern of daily work, that initiation stress dies down significantly.
4. You will not need to deal with distracting thoughts, events, and people as much. When you train yourself to work on a daily basis, the time you spend working becomes a solid, knowable event in your day. You will begin to protect that time in your schedule for the work. As a result, your work will be easier to pay attention to and to develop. The distracting thoughts, events, and people that are part of your day will have to wait a bit for you to finish your day's work.
5. You will develop a system of working and a sense of mastery. What I've learned from writing posts week after week (often with a daily writing routine) is the intangible factors involved in getting to my work smooth themselves out when I keep to a daily habit of working. When you develop your own daily practice, you'll find the mindset of working is accessible, the materials you need are at hand, and the readiness to produce is there.
6. Your work will actually progress. This is obvious, no?
7. You will not dread working so much. Wouldn't that be great?
When you develop a daily productivity habit, you develop a trusted way to make sure you maintain a healthy relationship with your work. No more complaining, no more obsessing, no more regretting. More freedom, more productivity, more confidence, more contentment. Sounds good to me.
