How to Beat Procrastination and Get More Done at Work

Procrastination is probably the single most stubborn obstacle you run into when you try to improve yourself. It shows up uninvited, slows your momentum, and quietly chips away at whatever progress you were making. The good news is that it responds to deliberate tactics. Shut it down, and your output climbs; climb far enough, and the odds of moving ahead in your career climb with it.

Big tasks are where most of the trouble starts. A huge report or a sprawling project sitting in front of you feels impossible to start, so you invent reasons to do almost anything else. The fix is to stop treating it as one monster and start treating it as a stack of small, obvious moves. Once a task is small enough that you know exactly what the next action is, the resistance mostly evaporates.

Take a research paper for school. Instead of staring at 'write the paper,' split it like this: gather your research, lock in the topic and the angle you want to take, build an outline, rough out drafts of each section, write the first section, then edit and revise that section. When the first section is done, you move to the second and run the same loop again.

Spacing the pieces out helps too. Finish one chunk of the paper, then knock out a small unrelated task, read half a chapter of a textbook, come back and do the next chunk. You avoid burning out on a single marathon push, and you clear several things off your plate in the same stretch of time.

Sometimes the room is the problem. Your desk might be buried in distractions, or you might just be sick of looking at it. Move. Go to the break room, work from home if that's an option, park yourself in a coffee shop or a diner. Whatever spot gives you a bit of a jolt and lets you actually concentrate is the right one.

Writing deadlines down works for a lot of people. A due date you can see in black and white is harder to ignore, and a looming one leaves no room for stalling: the thing simply has to get done. You can still carve the work into pieces and use every other trick in this list, but hold the line on the dates. Set them a day or two ahead of the real cutoff so you've got slack for a snag or a quick break.

Everyone has their own bait. Phones, social media, the games sitting one tap away on your laptop. If your job allows it, power the phone down and switch off the monitor. The friction of turning it all back on is usually enough to keep you from caving. Another approach: set an alarm, work in bursts, and when it rings, hand yourself five minutes with one of those temptations as a reward.

Pulling in another person keeps a lot of us honest. A partner adds a second source of motivation and makes it harder to drift. Spend a few minutes up front talking through the task and how you'll split it, which roughly halves what each of you has to hold in your head. Just don't let the teamwork become an excuse to slip on your own standards.

None of this fixes procrastination in a single afternoon. It takes repetition, and you have to keep showing up for it. Stick with the habits long enough, though, and you'll catch yourself stalling less and less, until most days it barely crosses your mind.

- Rosemary Kichen

Source: Healy, Rebecca. (2012). How to Stop Procrastinating at Work.