By now everyone has kissed the summer sunny days goodbye for a little awhile and has returned to school, but, um, how do you do anything other than sleep, again?
Well luckily for you we live in the age of the internet and can just look up how to be productive again. Then again most of these productivity gurus have been kicking their to-do lists behind for forever and have no idea what it’s like to start at square one and just wind up terrifying us. But you have me and here are 7 super easy ways to stop procrastinating and be productive.
Be honest, how many hours a day do you drain on social media? I once averaged 6 hours-one quarter of my day-a day on Wattpad despite having school. The result? My up to then stellar grades took a beating.
Delay Access To Distractions
If you want to stop procrastinating you have to know what makes you procrastinate and manage those distractions accordingly. Although it would probably be impossible (and possibly counterproductive) to remove every distraction making them harder to access is all that it takes for you to decide if that’s the best way to spend your time.
You can delete distracting apps from your phone, move the apps you want to use more to your home screen and tuck the others away. A tool I want to try using is this app, Pause.
Pretend You’re In A Movie/ Romanticise The Heck Out Everything
Here’s something I do all the time: I pretend that I’m the lead in a movie studying and working hard for the those glittering grades or trophies or whatever my character is known to get. I have no idea why but this is incredibly motivational*. Romanticising your life isn’t a bad thing, it just means falling in love with your life and your goals and focusing on them.
*How else would I be typing out this post?
Clean Out Your Digital Space
Nothing ever good comes from having a cluttered inbox, it just makes you miss emails from your online friends, lose the notes you sent yourself for your assignment and feel overwhelmed so do a deep clean of your inbox, your desktop your photos (you’ll be surprised how many times you accidently took a screenshot of your lock screen), your downloads**.
Feels great, right? Now make it a habit so that you don’t procrastinate going through dozens of files when you could be able to find the right one in a few seconds. Plus it just makes you feel motivated and like you can do anything-rightly so too, I mean you just cleared out 3245 pieces of digital junk and survived.
**It is such a satisfying sound effect, do not attempt to deny it.
To Do Lists
So simple, yet so effective. It’s proven that of you write down your goals (or what you have to do) you’re far more likely to achieve that. Take all those things that are floating around and write or type them out into your to-do lists.
Some of the items are going to be terrifying like “Launch Complete Site” so break it down into subtasks like “Write About Me Page”.
I love using Todoist because it’s just so organised and efficient and satisfying. Heck, it even organises my priorities and tracks my productivity and it is just amazing.
Schedule
Unless we actually set a time to do them our dreams can always become something we always meant to do, our goals and hopes never materialise. When we shedule things we make them a priority and can’t keeping putting them off.
If you feel like you can never work on a self-imposed deadline or a deadline that’s a few days early like finishing the first draft of your business proposal by Thursday (because you never actually have to start your own business, nobody is monitering you or forcing you). One of my all time favourite Ted Talks is In The Mind of A Master Procrastinator by Tim Urban, in it he explains that out “panic monkeys” are the reason that we stop procrastinating when we near a deadline. When we don’t have a deadline? We ourselves can be the deadline. We’re all going to leave this place someday so we do have deadline on our goals, hopes and dreams. So start now.
Engineer Your Environment
It’s a phychological fact that throughout the existance of humanity we’ve manifested our personalities in through objects and spaces around us, it’s the reason you have posters for certains music genres hanging around your room, it’s the reason your shoes soley*** consist of sneakers.
The power of this is overlooked.
You can set up your phone and design your room to motivate you, vision boards or quotes, or little things that help you feel motivated and inspired. Take me for example, I love learning and getting great grades but I have a problem actually getting myself to work. So I think put up posters of The Ravenclaw house to motivate me, quotes about learning and little sticky notes to myself saying things like You’re just following Hermione’s footsteps ;), I play music that makes me feel like I can actually finish my work (and enjoy it-but then again my definition of fun is fiction and physics).
Remember Why
We have a reason for everything. Nothing ever happens without reason, without a why. Why do you breathe? So you don’t die. Why do you cry? To let out your emotions. Why do you do homework? Because you’ll relish in the feeling of having it done, understanding the work and taking steps to your dreams. Why do you want what you want?
Answer the question, it won’t be hard. I have my goals written everywhere (as part of the last tip) and underneath each goal I wrote why I want it. It reminds us why we started and why we should suck it up and finish.
By now everyone has returned to school, but, um, how do you do anything other than sleep, again?
Well luckily for you we live in the age of the internet and can look up how to be productive again. Then again most of these productivity gurus have been kicking their to-do lists behind for forever and have no idea what it’s like to start at square one and so they wind up terrifying us even further. But you have me and here are 7 super easy ways to stop procrastinating and be productive.
Be honest, how many hours a day do you drain on social media? I once averaged 6 hours-one quarter of my day-a day on Wattpad despite having school. The result? My up to then stellar grades took a beating.
Delete Social Media Apps
Deleting the social media apps from your phone doesn’t mean you can ever update your feed, it makes it slightly harder to access and those few extra seconds are all it takes for you to make a better choice about spending your time.
Pretend You’re In A Movie/ Romanticise The Heck Out Everything
Here’s something I do all the time: I pretend that I’m the lead in a movie, studying and working hard for those glittering grades or trophies or whatever my character is known to get or do. I have no idea why but this is motivational*. Romanticising your life isn’t a bad thing, it just means falling in love with your life and your goals and focusing on them.
*How else would I be typing out this post?
Clean Out Your Digital Space
Nothing ever good comes from having a cluttered inbox, it just makes you miss emails from your online friends, lose the notes you sent yourself for your assignment and feel overwhelmed so do a deep clean of your inbox, your desktop your photos (you’ll be surprised how many times you accidentally took a screenshot of your lock screen), your downloads**.
Feels great, right? Now make it a habit so that you don’t procrastinate going through dozens of files when you could be able to find the right one in a few seconds. Plus it just makes you feel motivated and like you can do anything-rightly so too, I mean you just cleared out 3245 pieces of digital junk and survived.
**It is such a satisfying sound effect, do not attempt to deny it.
To-Do Lists
So simple, yet so effective. It’s proven that if you write down your goals (or what you have to do) you’re far more likely to achieve that. Take all those things that are floating around and write or type them out into your to-do lists.
Some of the items are going to be terrifying like “Launch Complete Site” so break it down into subtasks like “Write About Me Page”.
I love using Todoist because it’s just so organised and efficient and satisfying. Heck, it even organises my priorities and tracks my productivity and it is just amazing.
SCHEDULE
Unless we set a time to fulfil them our ambitions can always become something we always meant to do, our goals and hopes never materialise. When we schedule things we make them a priority and can’t keep putting them off.
If you feel like you can never work on a self-imposed deadline or a deadline that’s a few days early like finishing the first draft of your business proposal by Thursday (because you never actually have to start your own business, nobody is monitoring you or forcing you).
One of my all-time favourite Ted Talks is In The Mind of A Master Procrastinator by Tim Urban, in it he explains that our “panic monkeys” are the reason that we stop procrastinating when we near a deadline. When we don’t have a deadline? We can be the deadline. We’re all going to leave this place someday so we do have a deadline on our goals, hopes and dreams. So start now.
Engineer Your Environment
It’s a psychological fact that throughout the existence of humanity we’ve manifested our personalities through objects and spaces around us, it’s the reason you have posters for certain music genres hanging around your room, it’s the reason your shoes solely*** consist of sneakers.
It’s a psychological fact that throughout the existence of humanity we’ve manifested our personalities through objects and spaces around us, it’s the reason you have posters for certain music genres hanging around your room, it’s the reason your shoes solely*** consist of sneakers.
The power of this is overlooked.
You can set up your phone and design your room to motivate you, vision boards or quotes, or little things that help you feel motivated and inspired. Take me for example, I love learning and getting great grades but I have a problem getting myself to work. So I put up posters of The Ravenclaw house to motivate me, quotes about learning and little sticky notes to myself saying things like You’re just following Hermione’s footsteps ;), I play music that makes me feel like I can actually finish my work (and enjoy it-but then again my definition of fun is fiction and physics).
***Get it? Hahaha, okay I’ll leave now.
Remember Why
We have a reason for everything. Nothing ever happens without reason; without a why. Why do you breathe? So you don’t die. Why do you cry? To let out your emotions. Why do you do homework? Because you’ll relish in the feeling of having it done, of understanding the work and taking steps to your dreams. Why do you want what you want?
Answer the question, it won’t be hard. I have my goals written everywhere (as part of the last tip) and underneath each goal, I wrote why I want it. It reminds us why we started and why we should suck it up and finish.
And now let me know if these tips help you out and how you yourself get yourself motivated and Getting Things Done!
The Labyrinth Life 