Does Setting Aside What You Don't Want to Do Count as a Cure? | Beat Procrastination Lab Day 4
Not really
Not really
I "Feel" I No Longer Need the Pomodoro Timer | Tang Yunlu, technology reporter
That's right: I failed to get to bed early again. Working with focus is not the real chronic ailment among procrastinators. This is: you get into bed early, and an hour later you're still chatting and announcing "I'm really going to sleep now."
If you're hooked on late nights, you are not alone. I've known one friend for nearly ten years. She has been trying to sleep earlier since the day we met, yet after living in three countries and five cities, she is still in the support group late at night, reporting that another day's attempt at an early night has failed.
We may stay up late because we have so little time that belongs to us. Even when our purely private time starts very late, we want to stretch it as far as we can, to keep up the illusion that we are in control of our lives.
It turns out that encouragement within a group with a shared goal does help. If someone in the WeChat group hadn't kept reminding me last night that it was time to sleep, I might have stayed up even later.
Getting up early has become less painful, and keeping up exercise is no longer hard. If you want to try something similar, what you probably need is a push to get started and a mechanism that keeps you going. That is also why many counselors recommend group therapy for changing procrastination habits.
A group does carry the risk of "everyone else is putting it off, so I'll keep putting it off too." But for some people, keeping an eye on each other and giving reminders really works.
By the end of the workday I had completed 11 pomodoros, but the count no longer seems to matter. I don't need a break every 25 minutes to ease my nerves; I simply stay undistracted until a task is done.
Even when a message needs handling, I can now deal with it and not drift on to scroll through Moments and group chats. The Pomodoro Technique of the past few days left me with this lesson: following social networks in real time gains you nothing, and staying away from them for a whole day makes you miss nothing.
When the office gets noisy, I switch to a playlist I set up in advance to get myself in the right frame of mind. We once discussed how you need to find something that fires you up, to defeat procrastination at the root. The right music can fire you up on the spot and help you reach the goal of "act now."
RescueTime stats
To avoid distraction while reading, I try to read on a Kindle rather than in a phone reading app. I log in to WeChat's web version only when I need a long exchange with someone. But next to a colleague whose RescueTime score is as high as 91, I am still a fair way from being cured.
Still, after several days of sticking strictly to the rules I set, I've reached the point where I get a satisfaction that lasts longer than the quick sense of achievement from "finishing a task right away."
I edited and published the content for our WeChat official account, wrote an article I'm happy with, protected my reading time, moved forward the story ideas I'm preparing for next week, and still had the energy and free time to meet a source.
Spurred on by one big task, a quarter of my estimated workload, that I still haven't finished, I got through the other three quarters of today's work with unusual efficiency. As for that remaining task, I'll keep working on it after this report goes out.
But the hardest job hasn't even been started, so this doesn't really count as a cure.
I've decided to reject the label "procrastinator." Once you accept that role, you hand all your excuses over to the label, to some degree, and then feel free not to change. Nobody is 100 percent free of procrastination. Rather than sinking into self-loathing, try forgetting about procrastination altogether for a while.
How a Veteran Procrastinator Sinks Deeper and Deeper | Tara, project manager
Today I planned to try the Tim Cook routine.
When the alarm went off, I did wake up, but I quickly fell back into a deep sleep and got up even later than on the previous few days.
Yesterday I told Yunlu I would update my official account, but once again my day was chopped to pieces by a work call, web browsing, idle chats and eating. When I woke up and saw my fellow sufferers all carrying out their methods step by step, my anxiety seemed to get worse.
Datoujun asked me: why are you anxious?
Because the goals I set on day one still aren't all done. I seem to have walked into a familiar scene, repeating the state I've been in for months, even years, trapped in the procrastinator's world.
Frankly, I can't blame everything I've put off so far simply on "procrastination."
There are several situations:
In teamwork, if any one person delays a single step, everything falls like dominoes.
Take one image. If one line of copy isn't written well, the designer's artwork has to wait. If the design is late, delivery to the client is late. If the client is late to sign off, resource scheduling is late. If media buying is late, execution is late. For me, the whole project is then delayed, and an overdue item appears on my to-do list.
In a project, every action by the media, the designers, brand partners, the client and others is a domino that can knock me into procrastination.
So, in a way that's more complicated than for colleagues in other roles, curing a project manager's "procrastination" depends largely on other people.
The key to curing this kind is getting everyone on the team to manage their time. Sometimes I use team collaboration tools, including but not limited to Action plan, Tower and Teambition, but most of the time I still rely on managing people by hand, which, ahem, is of course why my time gets eaten up so badly.
Another kind is collective, common in meetings and proposal submissions.
As everyone knows, brainstorming at an ad agency isn't as glamorous as outsiders imagine. It may be a free-for-all where you pitch and I shoot you down, or a session where "what I fear most is the room suddenly going silent." When people can't agree on the creative, when the team keeps polishing an idea (rejecting and revising it internally because we aren't satisfied), when the Big idea is a difficult birth, all of it leaves a large solid-colored "wedge of cheese" in my aTimeLogger pie chart (all of it meetings).
In this process, the key to curing collective procrastination is making sure everyone clearly understands the brief, then produces ideas and makes decisions quickly and effectively.
And when working with an outside team, both sides need to reach agreement effectively.
Whether communication is clear, whether requirements are well defined or met, and whether both sides see the brand and the goal the same way all decide whether a deadline is met on time.
In this process, if everyone agrees on the goal, then the client's time management is the key to curing another kind of collective procrastination. (I don't think the client-agency relationship is one of customer and vendor; it's a partnership.)
And procrastination at work feeds procrastination in private life. I can hardly get started on personal matters, because I have almost no time of my own.
When I do have personal time, I do what many fellow sufferers describe: scroll through Moments, Taobao and Weibo. Because I'm anxious about the important things left undone, I end up wanting to escape, a bit like the emotional procrastination Yunlu mentioned.
Because the delayed tasks have piled up, I can't clear the obstacles in one go, so I walk around the mountain instead. Seen this way, whatever happens, "starting" is always the best approach.
I keep thinking I need a whole weekend to deal with it all at once, but in fact I can spare only an hour, or even half an hour, a day, never a whole block of time. So I do it half an hour at a time.
Then I found that once the half hour begins, it stretches, without my noticing, to one hour, then two, and the task gets done.
Like last night: while waiting for my phone to charge, I meant to read for just 10 minutes, but I spent an hour finishing a book I had put off for two months.
Finally, here is a passage from the book I read last night:
"Looking back now, we always fix happiness in the future tense: I'll be happy if I buy a big house, I'll be happy if I win over my 'goddess,' I'll be happy if I get promoted... Yet human desire never ends, and no happiness settles things once and for all. If we always live in expectation of the future, we miss the happiness of each present moment."
For procrastinators, or for anyone with a wish in their heart, setting out may be arriving.
Completing a Seemingly Impossible Task | Datoujun, designer
When Datoujun first described his symptoms, he stressed that he couldn't get up early and dawdled instead of leaving the house. So yesterday, when he announced he would get up early to take photos at the Temple of Earth, we all thought he simply couldn't do it.
Perhaps precisely because we doubted him, Datoujun's report today is especially beautiful:
Sorry, editor, I've just proved your jibe wrong!
Yesterday I set myself a goal: to go and photograph the ginkgo leaves at the Temple of Earth.
I got up at 8:30 today, saw that it was overcast and raining outside, and started to balk. The weather was so bad, rain plus smog, that good photos seemed unlikely. In the end I left the house full of doubt. The Temple of Earth is 20 kilometers from my home, about an hour and a half away.
On the way, a little grudgingly, I told my girlfriend, who lives far away, about the plan. She encouraged me to see through whatever I'd planned. But when I saw the row of trees at the park gate, without a trace of autumn about them, nearly all my drive drained away.
With one last bit of hope, I bought a ticket and walked through the gate. And I was stunned, and healed, by the scenery. Under the gloomy sky, a patch of golden ginkgo among the dark green pines stood out all the more brightly.
I didn't photograph the whole grove. Instead I used close, small-scale shots to build a late-autumn mood: ginkgo leaves on a bench, a ginkgo tree reflected in the water, a single ginkgo leaf floating on the water, a pigeon flying past a ginkgo tree, and so on...
An hour later I headed back to the office to start work, my mood no longer low. On the way I edited the photos on my phone, and by the time I reached the office they were all done. They got 50 likes on Moments, and my girlfriend says she wants to turn them into postcards: recognition from others also helps treat procrastination.
Today's plan:
- H5 demo; 2. logo extensions and references; 3. submit overtime form; 4. photos at the Temple of Earth; 5. new project meeting; 6. job interviews; 7. tidy up the computer desktop (editor's note: this task appears on the list every day).
Still unfinished: the logo extensions and references, and tidying the desktop. I plan to finish them later today.
The photos I shot this morning gave me the drive not to procrastinate all day. I think that in work and in life alike, we need to make things that draw a small gasp from ourselves and others, giving ourselves drive and passing some on to others.
Tomorrow is the last day of the experiment, so I need to think about what else I can do tomorrow to keep the drive going.
The Student Who Volunteered a Report Handed In His Latest One a Day Late
QuillBlue is a student about to graduate. On the lab's second day, we published his report. We never required volunteer participants to report every day, so, on the grounds that "3 and 4 belong together," he combined his third and fourth days into this one report:
Wednesday and Thursday were two completely different days. On Wednesday, apart from making two graphics for a student club, I spent basically the whole day quietly writing code. On Thursday I rushed between four or five places running all kinds of errands, and spent most of the time on the road.
In a way I rather like this kind of schedule: at least I don't have to worry about my quiet working time being cut into too many fragments.
After a day of logging my time with the Pomodoro Technique, I wanted even more to test how long I could stay focused on self-discipline alone, without any software.
On Wednesday I didn't turn on a timer. I just put my phone a little farther away (out of reach while working) and got started. It did curb the urge to play with my phone, but my train of thought was still, inevitably, broken by its vibrating alerts.
The lab was also noisier than usual that day, so to cut out the noise I put on headphones and played some soothing music.
Besides blocking out sound, I was surprised to find that I seemed less likely to be interrupted by unimportant things while wearing headphones.
Today my schedule was packed, and so my time wasn't my own. For example, when I went to the Shanghai World Expo Exhibition Hall to collect my gear for the Shanghai Marathon, I queued for a long time and was nearly late for an interview afterward. But I didn't procrastinate because of it.
Perhaps that's thanks to the deadline, the number one driver of productivity. In the afternoon, the lab's host forwarded me a screenshot of the comments section, telling me that readers were still wondering about the student who hadn't been sending in daily reports. With her nudge, as soon as my interview ended that afternoon I borrowed a desk, sat down, wrote this report on my phone and sent it straight off.
So it seems procrastination can be cured after all.
Today's Tips
- Don't rush to set goals like "don't do XX" or "no XX allowed." Goals that bind you to nothing yet easily trigger bad feelings often set off procrastination in the first place. Rather than telling yourself "no reading official accounts before bed tonight," first agree that "I'll go to sleep after reading QDaily's procrastination report." Give it a try!
- Choosing the right music matters. Whenever a colleague plays the earworm "My Boyfriend is Gay," everyone can tell that my typing speeds up twofold and falls into a rhythm, while some other colleagues hear it and want to jump off the 26th floor.
- If your surroundings often distract you, we suggest in-ear noise-canceling headphones to shut out voices, noise, and the pantry gossip that sounds especially interesting when you're procrastinating. QDaily's editors have tested and recommend the Bose QuietComfort 20. See the review here.
- And there's no need to worry that your surroundings can't stay perfectly quiet. If you can't change the environment, adapt to it rather than fight it. Insomnia itself is not frightening; worrying about insomnia is.
Lab Reports
Procrastination Experimenter B Loses the Tomato Race to an Added Meeting | Day 1
Procrastination Experimenter C, a Planner, Made Another Plan Left Unfinished | Day 1
For more anti-procrastination remedies and reports, follow the lab's updates every night.
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.