How to Stop Procrastinating Once And For All

Who doesn’t love procrastinating? It probably happened to you a dozen times (not to say more). You have to hand in a project for school, or you have to finish the plan for your boss, but you wait until the last minute to even start! We know it’s bad, and sometimes even unhealthy; suddenly spending all these hours in one sitting to reach your deadline cannot be good, right? We all know it, but somehow we still manage to procrastinate.

At one point in my life, I was so inclined to procrastinate that I wondered if it was even possible to get rid of it. After I read Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time, I decided to implement some of the suggestions. It turns out that you can stop procrastinating and here are 3 simple tips that worked for me!

How to Stop Procrastinating

Track your results

Think about one successful person in what you want to achieve. The ones that “make it happen” usually track their results. If your goal is to run 4 km a day, you have to know how many kilometers you can run today, and you have to track your results every day. If you have to hand in a ten-page essay in 2 weeks, you need to set yourself a certain number of pages to write every day and track it. Tracking what you do and when you do it tends to give you the discipline you need to achieve what you want. In the long run, it gets quite motivating to see your progression towards your goal and how close you're getting to it.

Track your time

Have you ever wondered how long you spend on each of your daily activities? Surfing the internet, watching Netflix, exercising, eating, reading, working, etc. If you want to succeed at achieving your goals, make a habit of tracking the hours you spend on any of your daily activities. This way, you can see how much of your time is spent on really productive work (that brings you closer to your goal) vs things that are unproductive (not contributing to your goal at all). It seems simple, but we want to increase the time we spend doing productive things and minimize the unproductive.

You can track your time the good old fashion way with a pen and paper. But you can also track your hours with a mobile app like Hours (iOS) or Jiffy (Android). With an app, it's alot easier to track your time as you can just press a button to record your session. It’s simple and efficient! Don’t worry, you don’t have to track every single move you make. If you know you will spend less than 15 minutes on something, you don’t have to write it down. Once you have some details about how you tend to spend your time you can then adjust your activities in a way to maximize your time towards productive things.

Track your Fun

Fun is important. If you start making better use of time after you’ve tracked it, you should not forget to have fun and relax. If you work productively, you will continue to give yourself some “off” time. From an outside point of view, it might look like procrastination, but it’s not. For example, you can allow yourself to watch your favorite tv show as a reward for being productive at what you wanted to do. In that sense it is not procrastination, fun becomes a necessary activity for you to be able to achieve your goals!