Five Ways I Get Unstuck When Procrastination Wins

You know exactly what you should be working on, and you still can’t start. The code stays unwritten, the design document stays blank, the next blog post stays an idea. Every knowledge worker hits this, and these are the five methods I fall back on when I’m stuck there.

Avoid distractions

The first and most obvious step is to cut out distractions, because they are often what started the procrastination in the first place. You open Twitter and Facebook while the coffee brews and you’re gone. From there the easy options line up: Netflix, YouTube, the infinity pools of social media, and an hour is gone. Resisting all of that costs willpower, and if you let it get to you early in the day, it sticks with you until your energy is gone.

I think it comes down to two things.

Be intentional with your devices

This is part of my goal for the year, digital intentionality: making these tools work for me instead of me being a consumer of them. A few simple rules I’ve adopted lately:

• Don’t watch Netflix on your phone or PC. Use a TV.
• Use your work machine purely as a work machine. Don’t install all the mobile-sync apps, such as messaging.
• Be clear about what your phone is for. Calls, messages and calendar are all I use mine for right now.
• Keep the bedroom for sleep and reading. My Kindle is the only device I keep there.

The autoplay “next episode” button deserves its own mention, and I wrote about it in Don’t Click That Next Button.

If you can’t help it, make it hard

When intention isn’t enough, add friction until the distraction is more trouble than it’s worth:

• Set screen time limits on your phone.
• Install a blocker such as Freedom, which blocks distracting sites and apps across your devices. A blocker is easy to switch off when you’re the admin of the device, so pair it with the other rules here rather than relying on it alone.
• Pay a fine into a jar every time you open social media when you know you should be doing something else.
• Uninstall the apps, or log out of all of them.
• Change your passwords to something you can’t remember and keep them only in a password manager on a different device, so logging in takes deliberate effort.

The key word is “avoid”. I know from experience that you can’t get rid of these distractions completely. One way or another something will grab your attention, so be mindful of it and use tricks that force your brain to steer around it.

Do one small thing, really well

Some days drag. A mix of unscheduled work, house errands and personal commitments takes a toll on your willpower, and some of those things are important enough that ignoring them isn’t an option. On those days I work on just one thing and do it well. My rule is to pick the smallest next action that takes under 15 minutes, such as writing the function signature or the first heading of the document, and finish that. Sometimes I simply do it, regardless of the outcome.

I used to believe I had to work in long, tireless sprints to achieve anything meaningful. That belief is part of what makes starting so daunting: if you think a task needs hours of unbroken effort, the easy route of distraction looks much more attractive.

As I’ve matured in my career and in life, I’ve come to see the outcome of a project as the sum, with compound interest, of what you do day to day. One heroic weekend doesn’t make a project successful; small daily iterations do. I don’t need to stare at a screen for eight hours straight to build a feature. I need to work on it little by little: a few minutes on step one, a few minutes on step two, and so on.

There will always be things you can’t control. You can only respond to them well. If you let them drag you down for the rest of the day, week, month or year, you’ll get nowhere.

Work with a peer

I think the era of solo heroics is over. Many of the best project outcomes come from teams, or from individuals who lean on peer review. Working with a peer is also the simplest way I know to create a deadline where none exists. Commit to someone you trust, someone who “gets” you, and tell them when they can expect to review your work.

That commitment reminds you that you’re not only doing the work for yourself: someone on the other side values it and will give you constructive feedback. Because the arrangement is built on trust, you rarely want to let them down, and that adds a small, healthy dose of pressure that feels more like a challenge than a threat.

This is not the same as committing to a manager or stakeholder, who might bite if you don’t deliver. The point is just enough pressure to get you moving, not more. It backfires when the peer is also your manager, because the review turns into a performance check, or when the deadline is obviously made up and you both know it will slide.

Schedule it

One thing that bothers me about to-do lists is that they keep growing until they become a monument to everything you haven’t done. I’ve tried different ways to handle that, and the one that stuck is an “if it ain’t scheduled, it ain’t happening” mindset. My lists are really “maybe” lists, a place to park things until I need them. When I decide it’s time to do something, I put it in my calendar.

Scheduling a task has some clear advantages:

• Once it’s scheduled, you’ve committed real time to doing it.
• If your priorities change that day, you simply reschedule.
• You can see the hours. Maybe an hour is too long and you only need 15 minutes. Maybe the task is too big for a whole day and should be split into subtasks.
• If you don’t finish in the time you set, you’ve learnt that the estimate was too short, and you book another slot.

A bonus: blocked time also protects you from meetings. If your team shares calendars, put the task number or identifier in the calendar event so everyone can see what the time is for.

Scheduling has a limit. On reactive, interrupt-driven days, such as a production issue or a run of urgent requests, a fully blocked calendar just becomes a list of broken promises. On those days I keep only one or two protected blocks and let the rest of the day absorb the interruptions.

Don’t be hard on yourself

On days when I feel I wasn’t productive, an inner voice starts telling me I could have done better, or that maybe it’s time to give up on my career. This is normal. It happens because you care about what you do and you’re deeply invested in it. If you want to understand the science behind it, I highly recommend the audiobook I Know What to Do, So Why Don’t I Do It? by Dr Nick Hall. Hall’s background is in psychoneuroimmunology, and the book explains why knowing what to do rarely translates into doing it.

Find a method that works for you, so you don’t hurt yourself mentally (or even physically) when the voice shows up. When it happens to me, I look at old photos and feel a sense of nostalgia for how far I’ve come. I look at goals I set in the past and feel proud of the ones I achieved or overachieved, and amused by the ones that now look silly. I also go for a run or practise mindfulness meditation.

Even the greats procrastinated from time to time. Marcus Aurelius opens Book 5 of Meditations by arguing with himself about getting out of bed in the morning, and Victor Hugo is said to have locked away his clothes so he couldn’t go out until he finished The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. The people you admire are no different. What kept them moving forward were their habits and their goals. So go for a walk, play a game, chat with friends, sleep, eat that baklava: whatever helps you recover your willpower and get energised again. Just don’t be hard on yourself.

When I need a reminder of what matters, I come back to a passage I really like from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations (Book 2, 5, in Gregory Hays’s translation for Modern Library):

Concentrate every minute like a Roman—like a man—on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can—if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that’s all even the gods can ask of you.

The short version

When you can’t start, don’t wait for motivation to arrive. Remove the easy escape routes, shrink the task until the next step takes less than 15 minutes, borrow a deadline from a peer, give the work a slot in your calendar, and forgive yourself for the days that don’t go to plan. None of these needs a burst of willpower; each one just makes starting a little cheaper. Reading more books has helped me here too, which I wrote about in how I built a reading habit.