Cleaning out the garage, filing our taxes, answering that mountain of emails, tackling a big work project—we all have tasks we avoid and sometimes even despise. It’s easy to think about our to-do tasks and we even write them down in lists, but it is much harder to get motivated to actually tackle the work. Even when you’re overwhelmed by the tasks you are facing, there are some easy-to-apply techniques to power through them. Here are four ideas to help you avoid the inevitable downsides of putting things off.
Eat the Frog. Mark Twain once said, “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” Self-help guru Brian Tracy says this quote serves as a good metaphor for overcoming procrastination. In his book Eat That Frog!, he suggests that you identify your most challenging task (the frog) and complete the task first thing in the morning (eating it) before you do any other work. “If you have to eat two frogs, eat the bigger one first. Identify which task is more challenging, and do that first thing.”
And why in the morning? Sarah Laoyan, writing for ansana.com a business management software company website, says that “scientists have found that some people's speed and accuracy at completing tasks are better in the morning. Your brain is at peak performance in the morning, so why not work on the most challenging task of the day? Use this energy to tackle the most difficult thing on your to-do list so it can get the attention it deserves. That way, you don’t have to worry about doing difficult tasks when you're tired and inattentive at the end of the day.”
Invoke the Two-Minute Rule. Think about your to-dos. Is it a laundry list of small chores—like filing receipts, clearing the clutter off on a countertop, organizing some computer files? Small tasks can bog us down so much that we end up in rut of procrastination. David Allen, author of the book Getting Things Done suggests applying the two-minute rule, companion strategy to eating the frog. The idea behind this rule is simple: “If an action will take less than two minutes, it should be done at the moment it’s defined.” This keeps the tasks from piling up over time. If it can be done in less than 120 seconds, do it now. Lifehacker.com makes the case that “getting a bunch of minor tasks knocked off your to-do list builds momentum: With several smaller responsibilities taken care of, you’re likely to feel more capable of diving into deeper work.”
The Do Something Principle. This strategy basically is if you want to do something—anything—just start with the simplest part of the task. Mark Mason, a three-time #1 New York Times bestselling author, says this is a sure-fire way to beat procrastination. If you put off going to the gym, for example, “just put on your gym clothes. That’s easy. Then once your gym clothes are on, you feel like a moron if you don’t go work out. So you work out.” What happens with the Do Something Principle, Mason suggests, is that “once you take one small, simple action, there’s a momentum that builds inside you, making the rest easier.”
Stop Trying to Multitask. “These days, with more ways than ever to be connected and communicate with one another, it can feel like there’s an endless supply of tasks that demand to be juggled all at once,” Dave Crenshaw writes in the Myth of Multitasking. “Appropriately enough, the traditional way of dealing with multiple tasks at once was to multitask.
But here’s the thing: multitasking is a lie. A more accurate name for this method of working is switchtasking, and it is an inefficient and inadequate way of getting things done. The human brain is an impressive thing to behold, but it doesn’t perform well when you attempt to focus on more than one thing at a time.”
Time magazine, referencing the work of David Ballard, head of the American Psychological Association’s Center for Organizational Excellence, suggests that “many of us fall into the trap of ‘juggling two or three tasks at the same time, so you finish one, but you’re still in the middle of the other. That ‘never-ending stream of tasks’ may make it feel like you’re never actually completing anything, which deprives you of the satisfaction of being done. ‘Take the time to wrap one thing up, put it away, take a breath, walk around for a minute and stretch before you step into the next thing so can move on having refreshed yourself,’ Ballard says.”
Intuitively, we know that we cannot procrastinate our way to work success or a happier home life. We know that we must act. So, think of a task and try applying one or more of these anti-procrastinating strategies. When you knock that chore off your list, give yourself a big pat on the back and go on to something else.
