What Are the Best Life Hacks to Tackle Procrastination?
1. Use Parkinson's Law to your advantage. Parkinson's Law states: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
There's a reason why you wait until the last five hours before you write that paper or begin researching for that project: It's because you're given that much time.
It's amazing how productive we get when we face an impending deadline.
An artificial way to beat procrastination is to give yourself a hard deadline.
2. Break down big tasks into minuscule tasks. This, I feel, is a much more effective strategy than giving myself an imaginary deadline or any other artificial motivation.
A big reason why we postpone is because when we think, "I need to write that research paper" or "I need to plan that trip," those tasks actually contain so many sub-tasks that it creates a mental overload, so we'd rather take the path of least resistance and wait until Parkinson's Law kicks in.
The way to beat this is to break down the task into micro-steps.
If my task is to write a paper, here's what the sub-tasks might look like:
Come up with five ideas and write them down
Narrow down the list to three ideas
Conduct basic research (skim) for each idea, taking mental notes
Pick the most interesting/appropriate idea
Find three articles/papers/studies on the topic
Read each article and take notes
Review all the notes
Formulate a general thesis
Create a simple outline of paper
Write one paragraph
Etc., etc.
If you take it one step at a time, it's not daunting at all. Come up with five ideas? Shoot, I could do that right now. It'd take me, what, one minute? Two minutes tops? Easy. Low barrier of entry. Maybe if I'm feeling good, I'll come up with seven ideas.
Finding three articles or studies? Google is my friend. As long as I don't have to find and read them all at the same time — easy peasy.
Write one paragraph? Shoot, a second grader can do that. I can do that.
If you want to hack your procrastination, break your tasks down into minuscule tasks that take very little effort to do. Instead of feeling obligated to dedicate 10 hours to a project all at once, why not take it on 2-3 minutes at a time? Anyone can do 2-3 minutes.
This is exactly how I am studying Spanish on Duolingo — I take one or two lessons a day; I do it everyday, it's part of my morning routine.
Instead of thinking of it as, "I'm going to learn Spanish" and feeling intimidated by the task because I feel like I have to be immersed, get a tutor, take classes on it or study three hours a day,
I just spend five minutes every day. Everyone has five minutes.
It might take me a year or more to learn Spanish, but it'll have felt easy and effortless.
This, actually, is my entire approach to life.
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