How to stop procrastinating
Plan your tasks -preferably, microtasks.
When your day starts, begin by making a list of the tasks you should finish by the end of the day. When you see there's a task that might take the entire day or more than 2 hours, split this task into a large number of small atomic activities. The trick is to split the activity into tasks that seem small in purely subjective terms. The reason why is no matter how mundane and unpleasant the task is, it’s just a small activity that you can easily get out of the way.
Although you still may feel an urge to procrastinate, the urge would be much weaker compared to a large task with an ambiguous goal.
📵 Remove distractions (that includes Instagram, whatsapp and other social media)
When we are focusing on a task, we need to remove anything that can distract us. Turn off notifications, or apps that cause notifications. Take a break from your email, slack, chat, messenger... I think you get the message here.
Find a flow that works for you
One of the top recommended techniques is the Pomodoro Technique where you set a time limit and then you turn off all distractions and work for x amount of time and you also have a defined breaktime before restarting again your work. You can check it out going to https://pomofocus.io/
Tell others about your goal
When you tell others about your goal for the project, now you have to be accountable. This reinforces the seriousness of those deadlines you set for yourself with each task.
Stop overthinking
At the end of the day, it comes down to making a decision and taking action. List tradeoffs between implementations and commit to one. When it comes to software development (or life), there is no correct way to do something. There will be many different ways to reach the goal. If your choice really does not work out, you can always backtrack and take another approach. Look at it as learning something new instead of a loss will keep you going.
💭 How do you stop yourself from procrastinating?
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