This post is highly opinionated, personal, and demotivating. Don’t read.

You may be procrastinating at the moment by reading this blog post the same way you do when you scroll Twitter/Instagram/Facebook/Reddit. If you have something more important to do now, do it now! Really, do it!

I don’t mind if you are not going to finish reading – this post is far from perfect. Also it might be the reason why it exists in the first place, since as they say “Perfectionism is a prime cause for procrastination, because demanding perfection usually results in failure.” Last call for action – go and do the thing you are postponing to do even if it won’t be perfect!

That crunch time

A lot of us tend to do everything at the very last moment. Sometimes working in the last moment is intense and very productive. Remember that night before the exam in school? What about crunch time at work not so long ago? If you succeed, last moment triumph has a certain joyful taste to it. If you fail, you feel miserable and crashed.

I remember a time at one of my previous jobs when I sat till 6AM fixing critical bug related to monetary operations, writing tech post and then coming to the office around 12PM like a hero (well at least in my own ego eyes). Moments like that made me happy, but those were my 20s. Now I really want to have my 8 hours of sleep and a sustainable pace of work.

Time management techniques don’t work. Do they?

There are time management techniques that try to address these issues so that you can plan and complete your goals throughout the time. For instance, there is one where you split your tasks into 4 groups like on the picture below.

The idea is to make yourself work on important but not very immediate tasks (B) so you don’t end up with important and urgent ones later on (A). And in no way you want to be working on (C) or (D). The idea is good, but it doesn’t work for me at all, and likely it doesn’t work for some of you.

One other idea is called “pomodoro” requiring you to split your work into 25 minutes of highly intense and focused work. This one mostly works for me but I have rally hard time sticking to it for a long time.

There are tons of other methods to make you work on things you would rather do later, like “East That Frog!“, but my argument is that these techniques suck a big deal just because they assume people are rational.

We are irrational, emotional, impulsive, lazy (ok, maybe not you) and we do not operate like machines. If something is not intrinsically motivating there is very little you can do about it. How about doing it tomorrow? (you know that mysterious place where 99% of human productivity is preserved)

Not suggesting anything

I cannot suggest doing anything as I am not an authority on anything. I know next to nothing about time management. I know next to nothing on motivating people. At the same time we all know what we need to do, but we just aren’t doing it. For instance, there are numerous books, techniques, “gurus”, programs, whatever for loosing weight, but everyone, and I mean everyone, knows that it all boils down to “Eat less, exercise more!” that’s it. Yes, that’s it, and yet despite majority fails. It only works if you fall in love, or, say, you are an actor to take that 10M gig or something else of high intensity. Sad, but true. You must be demotivated by now. Sorry.

Utilize what works

There are some things that work for me even when it is about doing something I don’t want to. Shame to acknowledge, but these are based on opinions of others about me (yes, that thing that we say isn’t important, but at the same time is often the most important to most of us, social creatures). Maybe some something else might be the kicker for you. Below are some things that work for me:

External visibility of progress

I find it helpful to state my commitments publicly. This generates pressure to complete whatever promised as not to look bad in eyes of others.

Self-imposed deadlines

In the past I would sign up for things that I knew I had to do but would always postpone, like that nasty certification exam or language exam or whatever. It works because there is an approaching deadline. On this note:

A rational decision maker with time-consistent preferences would not impose constraints on his or her choices. But if people impulsively procrastinate, and if they also are aware of their procrastination problems […], self-imposing costly deadlines can be strategic and reasonable.

Ariely, Dan; Wertenbroch, Klaus (2002) “Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Pre-commitment” (PDF). Psychological Science.

Challenges

I love being better than my previous self. This works best when it is something measurable, like personal record of some sort. This also works great if others would find it admiring. I know this worked for me really well as for instance I would complete my 200km running challenge in Sep 2016 despite being injured. These days I’m trying to play this game as well. I’m currently in four challenges where I promised to stick to my commitments to four different people. I also have few self-imposed challenges (not sure if these would work).

Hey, you, my reader!

If you have something you want to do, but you’ve been putting off lately, I am challenging you: play a challenge game with someone by promising them to complete the thing you want to do or otherwise you will complete a punishment (let them come up with it), ask the other person to do the same so both of you gain something from the interaction. Make sure it is something you can measure and share, also time bound it (week, two, month).

If we know each other, I would love to play this challenge game with you as well. Get in touch!