Yes, procrastination sucks, but it is part of life, stop complaining about it and do something about it.

Here are some tips I am using myself or have used at some point and have helped me along the way.

Start somewhere with a schedule for your days with objectives

Achieving your goals assumes you have defined some, and if your day is not going as you want, probably worth thinking what was that you wanted on the first place, what were you goals for the day, and what did you plan to achieve that you didn’t do. Because if you don’t make goals, that’s the best way to fail at meeting them.

 

Claim back your time by cutting your meetings in half

Yes meetings are important – but if you try to cut the chase in the meeting and get to a conclusion in half the time, you’d be surprised how much blabla and useless talk can go into a meeting and you’d be able to achieve more.<div class=‘avia-video avia-video-16-9 av-lazyload-immediate av-lazyload-video-embed ' itemprop=“video” itemtype=“https://schema.org/VideoObject" data-original_url=‘https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM7_6rjpb8E’ >

 

Gain clarity by defining clear deliverables

It is what you create not what you do that matter.

Focus on the outcomes, not on the activities.

People do not care what you did all day, if there are no results.

What is the result of your work?

Can it have a tangible form?

These are questions you may need to ask yourself from time to time.

These outcomes can be :

• an email produced
• an presentation
• an article
• or report.
• etc.

It is also okay to explore, especially when you do not know what you need to do or produce, especially true when you deal with some innovative and creative process, when you are not sure, you need to think, so you spend a lot of time researching.

But even this can be structured in a deliverable:

• it can be a list of materials you gathered
• it can be made into a blog post
• it can be a zip file, with a bunch of PDF for reuse.

Anyway, when you feel your time is going away with no result, it can be useful to clarify the deliverables.

Get your focus back with the pomodoro technic

 

In the end, it is all question of importance. You lose time because you don’t care enough about your time to take your day seriously and make every minute count.

 

Finally watch this :

David Allen has broken down the science of productivity into a method he called GTD – for getting things done. It is based on real scientific data, originally from some work done by the the NASA on stress. I am a big fan of his work personally and would strongly recommend you get his book.

Meanwhile you can watch a talk he gave at Google a while ago but which is to me still one of the best out there:

Getting things done – David Allen at Google: