There is a particular kind of person who can spend 30 minutes preparing to do something that would take 15 minutes to complete. You open your laptop, check your email, respond to one message, remember that you have not checked WhatsApp, check it, see something interesting on Instagram and tell yourself you will only spend five minutes there. Thirty minutes later, you suddenly remember the task you were supposed to do. At that point, you decide that you are no longer in the right frame of mind and promise yourself you will start tomorrow. Tomorrow, of course, becomes another day. I have always found the conventional conversation about productivity slightly amusing. We are told to wake up at 5am, create a detailed schedule, divide our day into precise blocks, colour-code our calendars, maintain elaborate to-do lists and somehow become a completely different person by Monday morning. But what if you are the sort of person who hates schedules? What if the sight of a timetable with every hour accounted for makes you want to run in the opposite direction? After reading a few books on habits, productivity and our complicated relationship with time, I have begun to wonder whether chronic procrastinators actually need more discipline. Perhaps many of us simply need to make starting easier. James Clear, in Atomic Habits, repeatedly returns to the importance of reducing friction. The easier a behaviour is to begin, the more likely we are to do it. This sounds obvious, but it has surprisingly powerful implications for procrastination. Consider writing a report. If starting means finding the document, locating the relevant emails, opening several attachments, deciding where to begin and then staring at a blank page, you have created a small obstacle course before the actual work has even started. Remove the obstacles. Leave the document open, put the relevant files in one folder, write the heading before you stop working and leave yourself a note saying exactly what needs to happen next. The objective is to make tomorrow’s starting point so obvious that there is almost nothing to negotiate. This brings me to one of the most useful principles for procrastinators: do not make starting a major event. Sometimes we make the mistake of thinking we need to be completely ready before we begin. We need the right mood, enough time, a quiet room, a cup of coffee and perhaps a little inspiration. Most of the time, we need none of these things. We simply need to begin badly. The idea of producing an imperfect first attempt is particularly useful for people who disguise perfectionism as procrastination. A blank page can be intimidating because we know what we want the final product to look like. The gap between the perfect version in our heads and the imperfect version we are capable of producing immediately can become paralysing. Write the terrible first paragraph. Create the ugly presentation. Draft the email badly. You can edit something that exists; you cannot edit a blank page. Another useful idea comes from David Allen’s Getting Things Done. One of the most important distinctions in his approach is between having a vague task in your head and identifying the next physical action required. “Work on proposal” is not really an action; it is a burden. “Open the proposal and write the first three headings” is an action. This distinction matters because our brains are remarkably good at avoiding things that feel enormous and remarkably willing to tackle things that feel manageable. Perhaps that is why the advice to “just do five minutes” works. The purpose of five minutes is not necessarily to finish anything; it is to overcome the psychological resistance to beginning. Once you start, you may discover that the task was never as dreadful as your imagination suggested. And if you still hate it after five minutes, at least you have moved from thinking about doing the work to actually doing it. There is another strategy that I find particularly useful: instead of waking up and asking, “How am I going to accomplish everything today?”, ask yourself, “What is the one thing that would make today feel worthwhile if I got it done?” This idea sits comfortably alongside Greg McKeown’s Essentialism, which challenges our tendency to treat everything as equally important. We cannot give our best attention to everything, and some things matter more than others. This is especially relevant in modern professional life, where being busy can easily be mistaken for being productive. You can answer 30 emails and still avoid the one decision that actually mattered. You can attend five meetings and accomplish nothing important. You can spend an entire day moving between tasks without completing the task that required your deepest attention. Sometimes productivity is not about doing more; it is about identifying what deserves to be done first. Then there is the slightly more amusing strategy of simply refusing to negotiate with yourself.
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