Life Clerks

OK, I’m done with procrastinating. I’m done with the guilt, anxiety, stress — and, of course, the not getting stuff done. I’m tired of answering “what’d you do today” with “nothing…”. Of course, it’s a lie — I did do something, just not anything important. Not anything that made me feel happier, more complete, or more relaxed. What I did today was spend 8 hours kicking myself, putting myself down, and telling myself “I’ve really got to do…”

Why procrastination is always easy to do right now

Psychologists tell me that the reason I procrastinate is because it feels so darn good. Can you believe that? All that guilt, stress, and bad self-image feels good?

It does though, doesn’t it? Not the self-recriminations, but the excuse-making and the excuse-fulfilling. Here’s why:

1. When we procrastinate, we tend to do stuff that we know how to do — there’s no risk. And avoiding risk feels good — our brain loves it when we don’t do stuff that puts us out in the open, stuff that makes us vulnerable.
2. Most of the kinds of things we do while we procrastinate are fun, offering an immediate payoff — instead of the deferred payoff of the routine, boring, or lengthy projects we’re putting off. A little thrill now makes us feel better than a bigger thrill at some point in the distant future.
3. Procrastination helps to prevent success, and we fear success. Success at anything important means change, it means becoming someone different, it means growing as a person — and all that stuff is really, really hard. Futzing around, on the other hand, rarely accomplishes anything important, so I can stay comfortably me.

I can’t tell you how much I hate knowing all that about myself! I bet you’re not all that thrilled about it yourself. And I didn’t even mention the part about how we hate our parents and would hate even more for them to see us succeed, since that would validate their years of torturing us into passable adults.

So what’s a poor, lazy sod to do?

I can’t tell you how to deal with your obvious childhood resentments, but maybe there is a way to get around procrastination without expensive and time-consuming therapy? Therapy that you’ll probably just use as another excuse not to do whatever it is you’re procrastinating in the first place? (”I can’t write my novel until my analyst says I’m ready…”)

Sure there is. When it comes down to it, all we have to do is a) minimize the rewards of procrastination, and b) maximize the rewards of non-procrastination. How hard could that be?

OK, maybe a little bit hard. So how do we do it? What’s the program? Let’s see if we can’t figure this out.

1. Make lists.

You knew I was going to say that, didn’t you? You know I love the lists. Lists are good — they’re fun to make, and even funner to throw out when you’re done. And they help us deal with at least two of the three factors that cause procrastination risk-aversion and rewards. Here’s how:

1. Making a list feels like you’re doing something. Bing! You’ve got your reward.
2. Crossing something done off your list feels ood. Bing! Another reward.
3. Making a list reduces the risk that you’ll forget to do something — and therefore that you’ll screw up and fail. Bing! Your brain likes that, a lot.

You can’t make just any list, though. As I never tire of saying, lists should be concrete, granular, doable — the first item on your list should be something you can glance at and immediately do. Don’t know how? Then it shouldn’t be the first thing on your list; figuring out how to do it should be the first thing on your list. Or, rather, “Use Google to find out how to do x” or “Go to library to get books on x” or “Take class on x” should be first on your list.

Then the next thing on your list should be something you can glance at and immediately do, and the third thing, and the fourth. If you can’t start doing something within two minutes of reading it on your list, it’s not concrete enough. Call it “The Other Two Minutes Rule”.

2. Get motivated.

There’s lots of advice on how to get motivated; whatever it takes you to be motivated, do that thing. Here’s one idea: play the best-case/worst-case game. What’s the best possible outcome of whatever it is you’re (not) working on? Visualize it. Daydream about it. Ok, put that aside for a minute. Now, what’s the worst possible outcome? Don’t be afraid — spill it. You finish your project and… what? Now ask yourself — how likely is that? Really? Be honest here — chances are you haven’t undertaken something that you’re wholly unsuited for. OK, that’s better. Now, ask yourself if the best-case scenario makes the worst-case worth the risk? I’ll bet it does (note: if there’ a chance that successfully completing your project might well kill you, please, try un-motivating yourself. I kinda like having you around!)

Another way of getting motivated is to relive past successes. How did you feel he last time you finished a project? What did you have to do to get that one done? How closely did the outcome match your fears? Yeah, not too closely, right?

Moving on.

3. Reward yourself.

There are those who say that rewards aren’t good motivation. Don’t you believe it. Those people are probably criminals.

OK, maybe not — but they’re only right about external rewards, a.k.a. “bribes”. As it happens, offering rewards to employees often doesn’t increase motivation. But offering rewards to yourself — well, that’s just good common sense. You need that Bing! moment — you are, after all, simply a giant hairless ape with a yen for gourmet coffee and a laptop.

Researchers places monkeys in a cage, with a button that, when pressed, dispensed a piece of food. “Yum!” said the monkey when he pushed the button. So he pushed it again. And again. Monkeys are, of course, just small hairy people without coffee or laptops, so they learn pretty fast.

Then the researchers added a twist: every third time the monkey pushed the button, he’d get an electric shock! “Ouch!” said the monkey — then he ate his treat. “Ouch ouch!” he said, the next time — then he ate his treat.

The moral of this story is that we’ll put up with quite a bit of crap, as long as we get our treat. Your challenge, then, is to find a treat good enough to hit the button for, even though you know it’s going to hurt like heck.

4. Be accountable.

Shame, guilt, humiliation — they can be effective motivational tools. The problem is, when they’re directed at ourselves, they’re corrosive, undoing motivation as fast as they create it. It’s hard to convince yourself you’re not going to fail when you’ve also convinced yourself you’re a no-good lazy stupid son-of-a-… badger.

My advice: outsource your guilt and humiliation to someone you love and respect. The world is flat, after all. It’s what Tim Ferriss would do.

What do I mean, exactly? Simple: tell someone — tell lots of someones — what you’re doing, when you’re going to be done, how excited you are about it, how important it is to you, and so on.

Now you’ve got risk. You fail, and everyone is going to know. Put that fear of failure to good use! Now what’s going to prevent the negative payoff of everyone knowing what you want to get done: a couple solid hours of work, however boring, or “just one more” round of Desktop Tower Defense?

5. Do it for three minutes.

Aside from, say, breathing poison gas or watching reality television, you can do anything for just three minutes, right? Get a kitchen timer (I don’t actually advocate stealing from your grandmother, but you do what it takes), set it for three minutes, and work. Since you aren’t likely to be procrastinating something you could do in less than three minutes, you have no reason to fear the successful completion of your project. And you can promise yourself whatever you want when the timer goes off — a cup of coffee, a game of Minesweep, a half hour of porn surfing, whatever. BIng! You get your reward — and guess what? Having gotten three minutes of work done will feel pretty good, too. Bing bing!

Next time, shoot for five. Then ten. Eventually, dare I say it, you might be able to put in as much as 25 minutes of solid work without dying — all in a row!

There’s something else, though: sometimes, once we start working, it feels so good to be working towards our goal, we don’t stop when the timer goes off. We start making excuses — “just one more sentence, I promise, then I’ll play Minesweep” — in effect, procrastinating our procrastination. Bing bing bing bing bing!

6. Learn to embrace change.

Last but not least, you need to get past the whole fear of success thing. Jonathan Fields, a guest contributor here at Lifehack, offers some tips in his article How to Sell Yourself on Lifestyle Change, and he should know — he’s had quite a few successes in his life, and all of them have drastically changed his life. For the better. It can be hard to imagine coming to terms with what success will mean for you, but here’s my promise: you’ll know how to deal with success when you get there, even if you can’t imagine it now.

It is traditional, of course, to end a post on procrastination with a sly joke about how you should start putting these tips into action, first thing tomorrow. But you know what? Procrastination can be serious stuff, so I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to tell you to turn off your monitor for a minute, get out a piece of paper, and write a list of what you should be working on next. And then start doing it. Because, believe me, you’ll be a better person afterwards. And that’ll feel great.

Bing!

Dustin M. Wax is a contributing editor and project manager at lifehack.org. He is also the creator of The Writer’s Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he’s not writing, he teaches anthropology and women’s studies in Las Vegas, NV. His personal site can be found at dwax.org.

Share This

Related Posts

• Thirteen Tricks to Motivate Yourself
• Turning Television Into A Positive Activity
• Procrastination Hacks
• Letting Things Go
• Putting Your Future on Hold
• 6 Reasons on Why are You Procrastinating
• Tomorrow May Never Come
• 7 Reasons to Borrow Grandma’s Egg Timer
• Are You Lifehacking Too Much?
• Working in Project Space
• Can the Lifehacking Concept Help You Live Until the Singularity?
• 5 Ways to get out of faffing mode
• Getting to Good Enough
• Self-Discipline: The Foundation of Productive Living
• Stay on Track with a Treadmill Journal

Original post by Dustin Wax

OK, I’m done with procrastinating. I’m done with the guilt, anxiety, stress — and, of course, the not getting stuff done. I’m tired of answering “what’d you do today” with “nothing…”. Of course, it’s a lie — I did do something, just not anything important. Not anything that made me feel happier, more complete, or more relaxed. What I did today was spend 8 hours kicking myself, putting myself down, and telling myself “I’ve really got to do…”

Why procrastination is always easy to do right now

Psychologists tell me that the reason I procrastinate is because it feels so darn good. Can you believe that? All that guilt, stress, and bad self-image feels good?

It does though, doesn’t it? Not the self-recriminations, but the excuse-making and the excuse-fulfilling. Here’s why:

1. When we procrastinate, we tend to do stuff that we know how to do — there’s no risk. And avoiding risk feels good — our brain loves it when we don’t do stuff that puts us out in the open, stuff that makes us vulnerable.
2. Most of the kinds of things we do while we procrastinate are fun, offering an immediate payoff — instead of the deferred payoff of the routine, boring, or lengthy projects we’re putting off. A little thrill now makes us feel better than a bigger thrill at some point in the distant future.
3. Procrastination helps to prevent success, and we fear success. Success at anything important means change, it means becoming someone different, it means growing as a person — and all that stuff is really, really hard. Futzing around, on the other hand, rarely accomplishes anything important, so I can stay comfortably me.

I can’t tell you how much I hate knowing all that about myself! I bet you’re not all that thrilled about it yourself. And I didn’t even mention the part about how we hate our parents and would hate even more for them to see us succeed, since that would validate their years of torturing us into passable adults.

So what’s a poor, lazy sod to do?

I can’t tell you how to deal with your obvious childhood resentments, but maybe there is a way to get around procrastination without expensive and time-consuming therapy? Therapy that you’ll probably just use as another excuse not to do whatever it is you’re procrastinating in the first place? (”I can’t write my novel until my analyst says I’m ready…”)

Sure there is. When it comes down to it, all we have to do is a) minimize the rewards of procrastination, and b) maximize the rewards of non-procrastination. How hard could that be?

OK, maybe a little bit hard. So how do we do it? What’s the program? Let’s see if we can’t figure this out.

1. Make lists.

You knew I was going to say that, didn’t you? You know I love the lists. Lists are good — they’re fun to make, and even funner to throw out when you’re done. And they help us deal with at least two of the three factors that cause procrastination risk-aversion and rewards. Here’s how:

1. Making a list feels like you’re doing something. Bing! You’ve got your reward.
2. Crossing something done off your list feels ood. Bing! Another reward.
3. Making a list reduces the risk that you’ll forget to do something — and therefore that you’ll screw up and fail. Bing! Your brain likes that, a lot.

You can’t make just any list, though. As I never tire of saying, lists should be concrete, granular, doable — the first item on your list should be something you can glance at and immediately do. Don’t know how? Then it shouldn’t be the first thing on your list; figuring out how to do it should be the first thing on your list. Or, rather, “Use Google to find out how to do x” or “Go to library to get books on x” or “Take class on x” should be first on your list.

Then the next thing on your list should be something you can glance at and immediately do, and the third thing, and the fourth. If you can’t start doing something within two minutes of reading it on your list, it’s not concrete enough. Call it “The Other Two Minutes Rule”.

2. Get motivated.

There’s lots of advice on how to get motivated; whatever it takes you to be motivated, do that thing. Here’s one idea: play the best-case/worst-case game. What’s the best possible outcome of whatever it is you’re (not) working on? Visualize it. Daydream about it. Ok, put that aside for a minute. Now, what’s the worst possible outcome? Don’t be afraid — spill it. You finish your project and… what? Now ask yourself — how likely is that? Really? Be honest here — chances are you haven’t undertaken something that you’re wholly unsuited for. OK, that’s better. Now, ask yourself if the best-case scenario makes the worst-case worth the risk? I’ll bet it does (note: if there’ a chance that successfully completing your project might well kill you, please, try un-motivating yourself. I kinda like having you around!)

Another way of getting motivated is to relive past successes. How did you feel he last time you finished a project? What did you have to do to get that one done? How closely did the outcome match your fears? Yeah, not too closely, right?

Moving on.

3. Reward yourself.

There are those who say that rewards aren’t good motivation. Don’t you believe it. Those people are probably criminals.

OK, maybe not — but they’re only right about external rewards, a.k.a. “bribes”. As it happens, offering rewards to employees often doesn’t increase motivation. But offering rewards to yourself — well, that’s just good common sense. You need that Bing! moment — you are, after all, simply a giant hairless ape with a yen for gourmet coffee and a laptop.

Researchers places monkeys in a cage, with a button that, when pressed, dispensed a piece of food. “Yum!” said the monkey when he pushed the button. So he pushed it again. And again. Monkeys are, of course, just small hairy people without coffee or laptops, so they learn pretty fast.

Then the researchers added a twist: every third time the monkey pushed the button, he’d get an electric shock! “Ouch!” said the monkey — then he ate his treat. “Ouch ouch!” he said, the next time — then he ate his treat.

The moral of this story is that we’ll put up with quite a bit of crap, as long as we get our treat. Your challenge, then, is to find a treat good enough to hit the button for, even though you know it’s going to hurt like heck.

4. Be accountable.

Shame, guilt, humiliation — they can be effective motivational tools. The problem is, when they’re directed at ourselves, they’re corrosive, undoing motivation as fast as they create it. It’s hard to convince yourself you’re not going to fail when you’ve also convinced yourself you’re a no-good lazy stupid son-of-a-… badger.

My advice: outsource your guilt and humiliation to someone you love and respect. The world is flat, after all. It’s what Tim Ferriss would do.

What do I mean, exactly? Simple: tell someone — tell lots of someones — what you’re doing, when you’re going to be done, how excited you are about it, how important it is to you, and so on.

Now you’ve got risk. You fail, and everyone is going to know. Put that fear of failure to good use! Now what’s going to prevent the negative payoff of everyone knowing what you want to get done: a couple solid hours of work, however boring, or “just one more” round of Desktop Tower Defense?

5. Do it for three minutes.

Aside from, say, breathing poison gas or watching reality television, you can do anything for just three minutes, right? Get a kitchen timer (I don’t actually advocate stealing from your grandmother, but you do what it takes), set it for three minutes, and work. Since you aren’t likely to be procrastinating something you could do in less than three minutes, you have no reason to fear the successful completion of your project. And you can promise yourself whatever you want when the timer goes off — a cup of coffee, a game of Minesweep, a half hour of porn surfing, whatever. BIng! You get your reward — and guess what? Having gotten three minutes of work done will feel pretty good, too. Bing bing!

Next time, shoot for five. Then ten. Eventually, dare I say it, you might be able to put in as much as 25 minutes of solid work without dying — all in a row!

There’s something else, though: sometimes, once we start working, it feels so good to be working towards our goal, we don’t stop when the timer goes off. We start making excuses — “just one more sentence, I promise, then I’ll play Minesweep” — in effect, procrastinating our procrastination. Bing bing bing bing bing!

6. Learn to embrace change.

Last but not least, you need to get past the whole fear of success thing. Jonathan Fields, a guest contributor here at Lifehack, offers some tips in his article How to Sell Yourself on Lifestyle Change, and he should know — he’s had quite a few successes in his life, and all of them have drastically changed his life. For the better. It can be hard to imagine coming to terms with what success will mean for you, but here’s my promise: you’ll know how to deal with success when you get there, even if you can’t imagine it now.

It is traditional, of course, to end a post on procrastination with a sly joke about how you should start putting these tips into action, first thing tomorrow. But you know what? Procrastination can be serious stuff, so I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m going to tell you to turn off your monitor for a minute, get out a piece of paper, and write a list of what you should be working on next. And then start doing it. Because, believe me, you’ll be a better person afterwards. And that’ll feel great.

Bing!

Dustin M. Wax is a contributing editor and project manager at lifehack.org. He is also the creator of The Writer’s Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he’s not writing, he teaches anthropology and women’s studies in Las Vegas, NV. His personal site can be found at dwax.org.

Share This

Related Posts

• Thirteen Tricks to Motivate Yourself
• Turning Television Into A Positive Activity
• Procrastination Hacks
• Letting Things Go
• Putting Your Future on Hold
• 6 Reasons on Why are You Procrastinating
• Tomorrow May Never Come
• 7 Reasons to Borrow Grandma’s Egg Timer
• Are You Lifehacking Too Much?
• Working in Project Space
• Can the Lifehacking Concept Help You Live Until the Singularity?
• 5 Ways to get out of faffing mode
• Getting to Good Enough
• Self-Discipline: The Foundation of Productive Living
• Stay on Track with a Treadmill Journal

Original post by Dustin Wax

Sticking to to-do lists with specific next actions can help you get things done, but we can all get lost along the way, whether in the wide-open playground of a browser or some other time sink. Productivity blogger Andre Kibbe suggests fighting a procrastination jones with a little self-awareness and a “Crutch Activities” checklist kept close at hand.

Instead of cursing yourself each time you find that you’ve spent 90 minutes in your inbox when you meant to check email for 10 minutes, add “Checking email” to your Crutch Activities checklist. Review and update the checklist regularly, and develop protocols, like batching, for controlling these impulses.

“Batching” simply means setting up a scheduled time to plow through email, as explained by guest poster Tim Ferriss. Another beneift of crutch-listing is being able to schedule your “crutches” as far away from important or time-sensitive tasks. If I need to look up a specific fact on food to finish writing an article, for instance, I’ll be closing down email until the facts are found.

Original post by Kevin Purdy

Invoicing is a part of every self-employed or freelancing individual’s life. Many of us are still using clunky old Word templates and those strange antiques known as printers—but why go to all the hassle, when there are so many web applications that offer reliable and efficient alternatives?

Digital invoices eliminate so much time and hassle that it’s unbelievable. Eliminating the need to go to the post box and send off an invoice gives you ten more minutes to spend reading Lifehack, or even ten minutes to do something productive! Continue Reading »

Where do people find the time to do things like edit the Wikipedia? They watch less television, says author Clay Shirky in a fantastic, brief talk at the recent Web 2.0 conference. Shirky makes a compelling case that people are just learning how to deal with the “cognitive surplus” of free time modern life affords us. We’re waking up from the “collective bender” of mindlessly watching sitcoms and instead, we’re choosing instead to spend our free time volunteering, interacting, and Web 2.0′ing online. Hit the play button to watch Shirky make his case for the full effect, or hit the link below to read the text transcript of his talk. Next time your TV-watching friends make fun of you for opting to blog instead, point ‘em to this talk.

Original post by Gina Trapani

Windows only: Ever use an online translation service and wonder if you can get more accurate results elsewhere? Translate.Net, a free Windows translation aggregator, knows just how you feel. The desktop app puts your words or phrases through 17 different language translation engines and dictionaries, letting you scroll through and compare results. A total of 25 languages are supported, but the program remembers your recent translation directions to save you the time of scrolling to find the right pairing. A great tool for language learning, or just seeing how different one phrase can be intepreted. Translate.Net is a free download for Windows systems only, requires .NET Framework 2.0

Original post by Kevin Purdy

Over at the TipNut blog, they’ve rounded up 20 supposedly disposable items and how to reuse them, in ways both common (newspapers for kitty litter liners) and unique (greasing pans with used butter wrappers). There’s a handful of items that might make you think twice before trashing, but with so many products turning the way of use-and-toss these days, there’s got to be far more creative reusable hacks out there. So I put it to you, dear readers: What items do you never toss before getting a little bit more out of them? How do you save money (and save landfill space) without spending a lot of time? What web sites do you turn to for reusable inspiration? Drop your tips, ideas, and links in the comments, and we’ll consider them for a future post.

Original post by Kevin Purdy

The 80/20 rule of economics can be applied to a lot of life’s dilemmas, but blogger Jodie Clements used the rule as one of her “10 Commandments” to help her drop 10 pounds and feel better overall. The 20 percent, in her case, applied to eating the foods she really wanted to enjoy:

Eat healthy 80 percent of the time - the other 20 percent - eat whatever the hell you like (but not after 9pm). The whole point of eating well for the long term (your whole life) is knowing that you can also have whatever you want sometimes and that yes, a little bit of what you fancy really does do you good. So - how about eating healthy Monday to Friday and saving the fun for the weekend? Works for me.

Eating “whatever” might be a little extreme (given how easy it is to start splurging on fast food these days), but dividing your food up into weekly percentages might be more rewarding than watching every calorie. Hit the link for nine other tips on losing weight and keeping fit.

Original post by Kevin Purdy

Ready for May flowers? First, a last April shower of this month’s most trafficked posts:

• Top 10 Harmless Geek Pranks
  April Fool’s Day: “Since the dawn of time, geeks have been playing harmless pranks on their beloved (but unsuspecting) associates, and it’s up to all of us to carry the torch forward.”
• Five Best Instant Messengers
  “On Tuesday we asked for your favorite instant messaging applications, and over 550 comments later, we’ve culled it down to the most popular five.”
• Turn Your iPod Touch into an iPhone
  “The iPhone and iPod touch are almost indistinguishable devices except for one major difference—you can make calls from your iPhone, and you can’t from your iPod touch.”
• Trim Down Windows to the Bare Essentials
  “When you’re installing Windows in a virtual machine or on old, slow hardware, you want the leanest, meanest and fastest-running configuration possible.”
• Five Best DVD Ripping Tools
  “Whether you want to watch a movie on your iPod or back up your too-easily-scratched DVDs, DVD ripping is a mysterious realm for many.”
• Top 10 Ways to Trick Out Your Desktop
  “For something that you look at every day of your working life, your computer desktop doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves.”
• Hardy Heron Makes Linux Worth Another Look
  “If you’ve flirted with the idea of switching your desktop operating system to Linux but never took the leap, the time is now. This week’s release of Hardy Heron, an Ubuntu release that will be supported until 2011, offers a freer, more productive space for work and play than ever before.”
• The Complete Field Guide to Testing Firefox 3
  “If you’re sick of Firefox 2 eating up over a gigabyte of memory only to freeze up and crash, it may be time to move onto Firefox 3.”
• Five Best GTD Applications
  “On Tuesday we put out our call for the best applications that help you practice the Getting Things Done productivity system, and from a mighty list of viable contenders, we’ve taken your votes and determined the five most popular of the bunch.”

Original post by Lifehacker

• 6 Ways For Maintaining High Energy Levels - Practical advice on personal development, productivity and GTD
  Experimented ways to stabilize our energy levels to maintain our productivity, happiness and motivation.
  Tags: productivity energy
• Time Budget: An Easy Way to Avoid Prioritization Dilemmas and Keep Your Life Balanced
  “The time budget is a practical method you can use every day to keep your life always in balance. It closes the gap between the high-level world of areas of responsibility and major goals, and the down-to-earth world of tasks and external demands.”
  Tags: planning productivity time
• 101 GTD Software Apps - Researched Comparison
  Extensive list of GTD software for different platforms - Web, Handheld, Mac, Linux and Windows.
  Tags: gtd software apps list todo

Share This

Related Posts

• Lifehack Digest for April 14
• Lifehack Digest for April 10
• Lifehack Digest for April 2
• Lifehack Digest for March 31
• Lifehack Digest for March 14
• Lifehack Digest for March 11
• Lifehack Digest for March 7
• Lifehack Digest for February 24
• Lifehack Digest for February 22
• Lifehack Digest for February 19
• Lifehack Digest for February 14
• Lifehack Digest for January 28
• Lifehack Digest for January 25
• Lifehack Digest for January 10
• Lifehack Digest for January 9

Original post by Lifehack Editors