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20 Top Tips to Tame Procrastination

witty epithet:I'm taking care of my procrastination issues, just you wait and see

Slow the Action – Pause, Notice, consider your Options. Take Your Time. Someone once said, “If you don’t take your time, somebody else will.”

Don’t go EAST ( Everything At the Same Time). Obviously you cannot do everything at once – can you? One thing at a time is plenty.

Think how great it will be to have started this. Taking that first step releases amazing energy and power.

Remember it doesn’t need to be perfect. There’s no such thing as perfect. Good enough is fine for now.

Do something you feel attracted to for a set amount of time before approaching the task in hand. Following your interests wakes up your brain and makes you feel more motivated. It can also pay to get a quick win with doing something you are interested in, improving your mood and giving you a sense that things are moving forward. Try making a list and ticking or crossing out completed items.

Do something physical first. Physical movement can not only help break the deadlock, it also releases helpful hormones, brain chemicals etc and allows you to re-oxygenate your blood. Your brain will thank you for it.

Take the pressure off. Too much pressure will release stress hormones like cortisol, effectively shutting down your brain in a most unhelpful way. Try one of the many free Mindfulness apps to help short circuit feelings of pressure.

Create a plan. Creating a plan will help to clarify your intentions and make it easier to see what needs to be done, and in what order. Check out this article for some basic planning techniques to try.

Think of just having a first go at it, like a draft or prototype. This strategy gives you the combined benefits of taking the pressure off ( see no.7 above) and also gives you the opportunity to think in more flexible terms. This way you provide yourself with multiple opportunities to refine your task/project/ideas, avoiding both perfectionism and the dread of making mistakes.

Chunk things down into doable pieces. If tasks seem too large and vague, they will appear far more off-putting. Making them smaller will make them easier to do.

Get clear on what your very first step will be. When you think you have your first step worked out, check it out by imagining yourself doing it and asking, “What do I need in order to be able to do this?” For instance if the first step is to call someone, maybe you would need to have the number in front of you before you can make the call. So the first step is to find out the number. Then you can ask the question again. “What do I need to do in order to find out the number?” It may be you need to look it up on your computer. So the first step then becomes switch on my computer. Continue asking this question repeatedly until nothing stands in the way of you taking that first step immediately.

Do a tiny bit of a tiny bit. This is similar to the example above, no.9 where we get put off by large or complicated tasks with lots of moving parts. Try subdividing your projects into mini- projects, and then into individual steps. One step could take maybe two minutes or less, and is therefore much more likely that it can be fitted in somewhere.

Have a back-up plan for if things go differently to how you would like. Having a Plan B can be reassuring, and provides an alternative to get on with, should you run into snags with your first plan.

Set a timer. Think of the amount of time that does not fill you with dread, maybe 10 mins or 5 mins and set a timer to do it for that long. Give yourself permission to stop after that.

Make it fun. Having fun is a sure way to stimulate the brain neurotransmitters that will help you get motivated and into Action.

Have rewards lined up for yourself for the effort you put in, rather than using achievement alone as your success criteria. As Carol Dweck has written, ” … [W]e can praise wisely, not praising intelligence or talent. That has failed. Don’t do that anymore. But praising the process that kids engage in: their effort, their strategies, their focus, their perseverance, their improvement. This process praise creates kids who are hardy and resilient.” from this article on Growth Mindset versus Fixed Mindset.

Get support from a buddy, friend or workmate. Support from another can vary from simply having someone in the same room while you are working, to cooperating on a task together, or asking someone to help you by regularly checking in on you.

Pay attention to setting your environment up to suit the way you work best. Everyone is different. Some need silence to be at their best, a tidy desk, a hot drink and their favourite pen. Others need their favourite music in the background, can work with piles and clutter all around them, drink only water, and work best in a cosy armchair. Experiment to find out what works best for you.

Have a race with yourself. Having a race with yourself adds an element of competition and fun. Try using a timer to see how much you can get done in “x” amount of time.

Think how you will feel once this has been completed. Will you feel relieved? Glad? Proud? Triumphant? Ready to do it all over again? Get in touch with those feelings and really imagine yourself into that place you will be after you have done this. Research reveals that future imagining and past remembering are stored in the same area of the brain. By using our imaginations to vividly create a desired future, the brain begins to tap into this information as though this future already exists, and is a memory that the brain can work with, helping the brain to problem solve and generate solutions to make your plans a reality.

Anna Schlapp B.A., AACC, ACC, is a certified coach with the ADD Coach Academy and the International Coach Federation. Specialising in ADHD and Creativity, Anna helps talented people like you find ways of being more creatively productive and productively creative.

Get in touch to schedule your complimentary coaching session with Coach Anna.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Procrastination Isn’t Always Intentional: How ADHD Traits Can Derail Productivity For Creative Entrepreneurs. Part One of a Two Part Blog

Procrastination most likely affects us all at one time or another. My recent search of Amazon yielded over 3000 results for books on the subject. Someone must be reading them! This behaviour of putting things off until a future unspecified time, commonly known as ”procrastination”, probably doesn’t occur on a daily, hourly, or even minute by minute basis for most of us, and it can be particularly poignant for those of us with ADD/ADHD when it does.

Procrastination can be perceived as intentional, i.e. you are aware of putting something off, and unintentional, i.e. it just happens because of the interplay between other factors.

So, what is it about ADD/ADHD that makes the creative entrepreneurs among us with this condition so exceptionally good at procrastinating? Beneath the surface, things are not always what they may seem…

There are quite a few factors that come into play. Here are just a couple.

Working memory:

Imagine a brain that’s as full of creative ideas as a pan of popcorn with no lid on. Ideas are continually popping into existence, but because the pan has no lid on many of them are escaping.

Then see yourself trying to catch hold of those ideas before they can slip off, because they are great ideas! One minute there you are holding in your mind a fantastic concept for how your whole business could be run more efficiently, and the next minute it has skittered off down a side alley never to be seen again! Have that happen several times a day for years and years of your life and how would you be feeling? How can you start something brilliant that you cannot reliably get a hold of a lot of the time? Devastating!

Or imagine your brain is like a computer that intermittently keeps losing its internet connection. You try going to a website to look something up, you know the information is there, but you cannot reliably access it when you need it. How frustrating is that!

Even if you can recall or keep hold of your ideas, this next trait makes it hard to work on them;

An aversion towards routine:

Suppose you have an inexplicable dread of doing the same things in the same way every day. What would it be like to hate routine? How many things would get put off as a result? ADDers often have a dislike of routine and can even have an aversion to the very word “routine”. Maybe it’s something to do with the need for novelty and stimulation and the fact that things that become boring are painful to the person with ADHD; repeating the same things over and over can literally feel excruciating.

Many of my clients are highly talented in their creative field, yet the thought of e.g. sending regular emails out to their list of potential buyers fills them with inertia. For the creative entrepreneur this can be problematic in that in any business there are a number of routine responsibilities, such as keeping on top of finances, or regular marketing activities, which help the business run smoothly.

If left uncompleted, things begin to pile up, adding psychic stress to the already complex mix of other ADD/ADHD traits. Things like paying bills or submitting tax returns can carry an unpleasant financial penalty if they are not done. The uneasy feeling of potential punishments hanging in the air means the ADD/ ADHD brain is that much more likely to succumb to overwhelm, and grind to a full stop. Procrastination reigns.

The brain saves energy when habits or routines are repeated and they become automatic. The person acquiring these habits will find they are able to complete them faster and easier as time goes on. Yet ADDers often find these tasks so gruelling that they never repeat them the same way for long enough for this to happen. Something usually comes along to knock them off trajectory, something more interesting, and I don’t think to date I have met a person with ADD/ADHD who didn’t have many interests and enthusiasms, past and present.

So, what’s the solution? : Well, for a start, it can be helpful simply to understand that if something more interesting presents itself at a time that needs to be devoted to something perceived as boring, then the interesting thing will be the one that gets the attention.

Knowing that many routine tasks can get put off by default, can be a guide to where you can direct your energies in building strategies to address these tendencies. For some tips see my blog on How to Tackle the Boring Stuff here

For some this can mean finding ways to capture ideas quickly before they disappear into the Abyss of Forgotten Memories, while for others it might mean strategies to make the Boring become more Interesting.

However it occurs, the reality is that putting things off can have dire effects on productivity, and for creative entrepreneurs, every minute counts. Delaying action for whatever reason, is liable to short-circuit your profit margins and your self-esteem if left unchecked.

In Part 2 I’ll be putting some more ADD/ADHD traits under the spotlight and considering how they also can contribute to the complex phenomenon we know as Procrastination.

Get in touch to schedule your complimentary coaching session with Coach Anna.

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20 Top Tips to Tame Procrastination

Procrastination : How ADHD Traits Can Derail Productivity for Creative Entrepreneurs