Let People Know You're Working, and Don't Fret When You're Interrupted | Beat Procrastination Lab, Day 2

Today's biggest problem: we tried to work with total focus for a fixed block of time (one Pomodoro), and kept getting interrupted, sometimes by others, sometimes by ourselves.

This is day two of the "Beat Procrastination" lab. Over this week, three volunteers will strictly follow one or two of the therapies and record, day by day, what it is like to try to beat procrastination.

We don't want to tell you, in the voice of a self-help book, that the key to curing procrastination is to avoid distraction and work through your to-do list item by item. Most people who say they suffer from procrastination are already experts on its cure, in theory.

In practice it doesn't work that way. Even if you start with great resolve, you will hit all kinds of obstacles along the way, because that is how we are made: we like bright, shiny things that distract us, and those things may simply be more interesting than whatever you are supposed to be doing. So to beat procrastination, you need a drive that sets you on fire.

Here are today's treatment reports.

Tang Yunlu, reporter | Training my attention at an art museum

Today I again got up on Apple CEO Tim Cook's schedule. I had finished yesterday's report and got home at 11 p.m., so when the alarm went off at 3:45 after four hours of sleep, of course I hesitated.

But I thought of having to check in on the WeChat group of fellow sufferers, gritted my teeth and got up.

I have seen Beijing at four in the morning many times. Before, it was because I had put off a piece of work and stayed up all night; now I get up early to go running, to beat procrastination. Compared with yesterday, I have started to get used to exercising outdoors, though only at noon did a colleague tell me that today's PM 2.5 reading was 300.

In fact my worst symptom is getting hooked on the distractions my phone brings. I can't concentrate in the digital world, and having to discuss work with people on WeChat all day makes the procrastination worse.

Rescue Time: blue means high efficiency, red the opposite

Rescue Time, which tracks how you use your computer, counts WeChat, Slack, Gmail and other messaging tools as low productivity. So even though I handled messages only in the gaps between Pomodoros, just 69% of my time on the computer that day counted as productive.

On Sunday I interviewed Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows. He has spent years on one question: how to regain the ability to concentrate in a digital world full of interruptions, and how to stop the internet from taking away our capacity for deep thought.

On fighting procrastination, he pointed me to the method of an art history professor. She found that "patience" now had to be taught as a subject in its own right. So before her students start work on a research paper, she sends them to the gallery or museum that holds the artwork the paper is about.

The students spend a long stretch of time (say, three hours) doing nothing but looking at the painting. This is of course somewhat painful, but it pulls the students out of the familiar surroundings they live in every day, and the change of place itself marks a break from everyday distractions.

As it happened, I had no time-sensitive work this morning, so I decided to spend an hour at the National Museum of China, find an artwork and use it to train my attention.

I looked at this one painting for an hour

That hour was a rare experience. I seldom get the chance to look at a work of art so closely and with so much effort. I could study, from top to bottom and over and over again, how the rocks, the stream and the trees were painted. In that hour, at least a few dozen people stopped in front of the painting, took a photo with their phones and left.

When the alarm told me the time was up, I felt lucky. Not only had I found that I could in fact concentrate; I also felt the satisfaction of reading a single work with full attention, something I hadn't felt in a very long time.

The effect of the museum therapy has lasted until now. On the subway back, I read three full chapters of a book without breaking off to scroll through Moments, subscription accounts or new messages.

aTimeLogger statistics

Over the day I completed 14 Pomodoros, but staying uninterrupted in an office is hard. Sometimes I even had to pretend not to hear a colleague asking if I wanted a snack. For a while the editors arguing loudly next to me drove me mad; it only got better when I put on headphones and listened to white noise.

A friend suggested I wear a hat with an LED screen: when it shows a tomato, everyone leaves me alone. But in a job where you have to talk to people all the time, that isn't realistic. And this irritation may itself be one reason attempts to beat procrastination fail. If you are too tense, too eager to change things, too keen to look focused, anxiety ends up replacing the drive you need.

After all, the point of beating procrastination is to get things done on time, not to collect as many tomatoes as possible. I began to wonder whether many people fail to beat procrastination with self-tracking tools precisely because they have forgotten why they are cutting time into Pomodoros in the first place.

Another volunteer, Tara, finished her report in a taxi on the way back to the office from a client's, and barely made the deadline. A project manager's progress often depends on other people, which seems to be one reason her procrastination has been so hard to cure.

Tara, project manager | Why my procrastination got worse

Yesterday I planned 17 tasks in all, and put off 7: 4 work tasks and 3 personal ones.

All 4 work tasks depended on other people, which means the delays came from a third party. I got up at 8:10 a.m., went to sleep at 2 a.m., and spent 30% of my time in meetings. I had expected this before the experiment began, but aTimeLogger recorded where the time actually went.

The share of each activity as recorded by aTimeLogger

Yesterday's procrastination made everything worse today. I lay in bed, so today's tasks started late; too little sleep left me sluggish and more irritable; and yesterday's leftover tasks went onto today's list, which made me more anxious. This is exactly how procrastination keeps getting worse.

So I had found the main reason.

After reading my fellow patients' reports, I realized that none of yesterday's 4 Pomodoros could count: only a block of work fully focused on one thing counts. So today's goal was 8 complete Pomodoros. By the time I handed in this report I had finished only one, and that was the one I had set aside last night for planning an event. I can't focus on one thing even for 25 minutes. It is truly depressing.

On my way to a meeting at a client's, I worked out the three things that stop me concentrating for even 25 minutes: sudden requests from colleagues and clients, new tasks, and chatting.

Because of the nature of my job, I seem to need to answer colleagues and clients the moment they call. At other times, I often join a chat among colleagues and only then realize I should have been focusing on the work in front of me.

For these two problems, I wondered whether I could change how I work and delay my responses. This is quite different from tackling my own procrastination, where the aim is to deal at once with small, urgent tasks and finish them in two minutes. Other people's requests, unless they are especially high in priority and importance, I would put off until after the Pomodoro break.

As for drifting off without noticing, I tried putting on headphones to cut myself off physically. Today, because a major matter was held up by everyone at once and I was stuck in all kinds of tedious back-and-forth with third parties, by the afternoon I was anxiously listening to the Heart Sutra.

I said yesterday that I love making plans. In the afternoon, Yunlu advised me to give up planning: if a perfect plan makes you put things off, never make such a perfect plan again. Because a plan you never finish sounds like this: "I have a perfect kitchen knife, but I can't get anything done with it, and it won't cut any meat..."

The instant I heard this, I was filled with dread. No plans? Or rather, what does "plan" actually mean? Does not planning mean giving up my Excel and Tower? Or is there some substitute?

I had thought I already knew how to beat procrastination and only lacked willpower. Could there be another way after all? I don't know. That is what puzzled me most today.

Big Head, designer | When I handed in my report, half the day's work was still undone

After submitting yesterday's report, I actually sat through nearly 6 more hours of meetings and got home at 2 a.m. I forgot to set my alarm, so the plan to get up at 8 fell through, and I didn't work out before going to work as I did yesterday.

This is where the time went

Today's plan:

1. Finish the H5 demo;

2. A video shoot at 11 a.m., to support another project team at the company;

3. Finish a poster design;

4. Go to the bank to repay a loan (already put off for four or five days);

5. Attend the all-company meeting;

6. Take a photo to post on my personal official account (opened two months ago, first post still not published);

7. Work out in the evening;

8. Organize the files on my computer.

As of now (7 p.m.), only the last two are not done, and I will go to the gym once I hand in this report. Compared with yesterday, far fewer items are left undone, and yesterday's leftovers have been cleared.

My method is the same as yesterday: list all the to-dos and deal with them one at a time. The main reason I procrastinated less today is that I wasn't dragged, as I was yesterday, into several unscheduled brainstorming meetings that took my time out of my hands. Today I had more time for other things, and I ranked the to-dos by priority and by the fixed schedule.

Watching myself knock out the to-dos one by one gave me a real sense of achievement. But many things can't be finished in a day. They may have to go on the task list too, and I can do a little of them each day when I have time to spare, rather than finishing them all at once. (Editor's note: there is a very obvious risk of procrastination here.)

Another method: make full use of the commute. For example, plan the day, or read in one sitting the news and Moments posts that I used to check on and off all day.

Today I also used aTimeLogger to record everything at work and at home. In this chart I can see clearly how much time I spent on each thing over the day.

I also think that putting the task you find hardest first may make the other tasks easier to get done. (A side note: some say that starting with the easy ones makes you better at following through.)

Wait, today one more person volunteered for treatment

QuillBlue is a student about to graduate. For two days in a row he has been treating his procrastination by sending us reports. Because his work is fairly uniform, we thought his case was better suited to discussing the Pomodoro Technique. Here is his report:

Today's plan: apart from finishing the stack of forms for my degree application (not actually that thick) and doing a last 10 km training run in the evening for Sunday's Shanghai Marathon, I would spend the rest of the time writing code for an outsourced project. So today I meant to use the Pomodoro Technique properly.

As a timer I chose 30/30 (iPhone), which I already used as a timer. Compared with Pomodoro, I think its advantage is that it moves on to the next phase automatically when one ends, so you just act on the chime and don't have to worry about forgetting to start or stop the Pomodoro timer.

Of course, it wasn't designed for the Pomodoro Technique, so it doesn't record how many tomatoes you have planted. Also, to keep myself from drifting off at the computer, I again used the Chrome extension StayFocusd and set it to block every site except search engines and technical forums during working hours.

My day turned out roughly like this:

8:00-8:20 Got up, washed, had breakfast

8:20-9:30 Subway + campus shuttle

9:30-10:00 Tidied the lab desk I had long been unable to stand looking at

10:00-11:15 Finished the degree application and started project work

11:15-12:00 Lunch

12:00-13:00 Too sleepy to go on, so napped face down on the desk for a while; not very productive

13:00-16:20 Project work

16:20-17:30 Shuttle + subway

17:30-18:40 Cooked

18:50-19:30 Dinner / washed the dishes

19:30- Wrote today's report

I completed only 8 Pomodoros, and strictly speaking two of them don't count, because during them I glanced twice at push notifications on my phone (though I didn't act on them).

All the rest of the time turned into rotten tomatoes. I was interrupted by a phone call about an interview schedule, by a junior labmate's questions, and by other things like that. I could firmly tell the people around me that their questions would be dealt with in a later Pomodoro (and I did exactly that), but that tomato still went bad, didn't it?

On the whole, though, the day went fairly well: even with only 8 Pomodoros, I met all the project goals I had set for the daytime. The method does seem to work, and even imperfect tomatoes pay off quite a lot.

It is like the interval runs that long-distance runners use to train their heart and lungs. One Pomodoro is easy, and you may not even want to stop, but after three or four the five-minute break feels incredibly precious, and by midday you feel your health bar is almost empty.

Today's Tips

• If you can't make sure you go to bed early, forcing yourself to get up early may leave you drowsy all the next day. To make getting up less painful, these past two nights I used the guided bedtime audio in Yunmeng (iPhone | Android) to help me fall asleep. Before that I also used Sleep Cycle (iPhone | Android) to manage my sleep, which helped me sleep fairly well even when I didn't get enough hours.
• If you know a task will be hard to stick with, you can join a group to keep each other going. But a fellow patient told me: "A few friends set up a group. Every morning we posted our tasks, every evening we reported our progress, and anyone who didn't finish had to send a 100-yuan red envelope. After a while nobody in the group said anything..."
• In the survey we ran before the lab began, we found that most fellow patients had tried the Pomodoro Technique and failed. In fact, all four of today's reports touch, more or less, on the same point: when you use the Pomodoro Technique, shutting out the people around you is sometimes unrealistic. Our advice is to tell the people around you what you are doing. And if you are interrupted, there is no need to get especially anxious. The Pomodoro timer is only there to help you build a habit of concentrating. Collect twenty tomatoes and you still can't cook them into tomato sauce and eat it, can you?

Lab Reports

Getting Up at Four Like Tim Cook to Take On My Procrastination | Beat Procrastination Lab, Day 1

Procrastination Fighter B Drew Tomatoes and Lost to a Last-Minute Meeting | Day 1

Procrastination Fighter C, a Lover of Plans, Made Another Plan She Didn't Finish | Day 1

For more anti-procrastination therapies and reports, follow the lab's updates every night this week.