To demonstrate what I mean, let’s start with some insight about how I use this little powerful technique:

At the moment I’m doing a research project at the University of York, which involves computational biology and robotics. It’s a very cool project and so far I’ve learned a programming language that I didn’t know before (it’s C++ and we learned Java in our first year at Sussex), I refreshed my knowledge about Genetics and Evolution, figured out how to install the simulation software Player/Stage on a mac (not trivial at all), learned a bit about multi-threading – even though I gave up on it, because it wasn’t really necessary – and now I know how to control a simulated robot in Player/Stage.

On top of that after only 5 weeks this project fulfilled one of my goals connected with my Computing and AI degree. When I did my research for my Bachelor thesis in Media and Cultural Studies (the title was ‘Intelligence and the so-called “New”. On selected questions in earlier and recent AI-Research’) I read a lot about Rodney Brooks and his robot control approach of a subsumption architecture and I really had no idea how to implement this kind of stuff. My Computing and AI degree was supposed to teach me how to do that. Yesterday I finished coding a subsumption architecture to control my simulated robot and I’m really happy about that. I now know how to implement it! And then came something that we all know too well: I tried avoiding the harder bit – I tried avoiding to start with the computational biology part of my project, because I don’t quite understand the underlying concepts yet and the computational bit is someone else’s code, who didn’t document it at all. It’s just a nasty bit of work to understand what he’s doing and how I can use it!

Yesterday instead of starting with that in the afternoon I had a chat in the coffee kitchen and then my work day was over. That was still fine, because I just finished a nasty bit of work before that and needed to unwind for a bit. Today it became obvious though: I was actually documenting my own code to avoid looking at someone else’s undocumented code. Documentation is one of the really really boring bits of programming. Most code stays undocumented, because nobody can be really bothered to write down what it does. After about 2 days even the person who coded it won’t understand anymore what it’s doing, but well, it works, why bother? Some people even don’t document there code, so that nobody else can understand it and they keep their job. And I documented my code for the entire morning! I was procrastinating!

Everyone in the office thought I was doing something productive, something necessary and important and there I was procrastinating. You might think now: “Oh she’s telling us, that it’s a matter of perspective and the youtube video I watched earlier might change my life in 5 years …”, but oh no, I’m definitely not saying that: the youtube video you watched was probably not worth your time and you know it. This is no matter of perspective, this is a matter of choice and discipline. As I already mentioned in the post Getting things done without a deadline, there is always something that is worse than the one thing you’re doing right now. Along the same lines there’s always something easier, than the one thing that you’re trying to avoid.

Let’s bring in some more examples:

• When exams were close, my bathroom was always clean, because I was procrastinating. Cleaning the bathroom still was something I had to do though!
• In the last deadline period I couldn’t be bothered to start with a certain deadline, because it was horrible. Instead I did the one deadline that was furthest away, because it was the most interesting one of that period. I had to do it anyway and it gave me an excuse to avoid doing the nasty first deadline.
• When I was ill from a diet mistake 2 weeks ago I was actually supposed to write some C++ code for my project. I got stuck though, because I didn’t know the language very well and basically didn’t really know what I was doing. What did I do instead? Well, I set up this blog, which was something that I wanted to do for a very long time now and it was still procrastination!

Let’s just be honest with each other: Procrastination gives you a really good feeling! You’re avoiding something that you don’t want to do for one reason or another and for a while you even have the feeling that you might get away with it. You might even think that you might not have to do the thing that you’re avoiding at all. It will just go away if you ignore it for long enough, won’t it? Well, that’s how problems really get out of hand and you suddenly end up in your yearly performance meeting with your boss telling you that he knows that you’re procrastinating. Not good, not good at all!

What I’m trying to tell you today is that procrastination doesn’t necessarily have to be bad at all! In fact it is a very healthy response to a rather unbalanced situation where you constantly confront yourself with things that you don’t want to do. It can’t be good for your mental health to hate what you’re doing and to still do it anyway!

Now let’s come to the practical side of this insight: How can you use this in your daily struggle for productivity? How will you end up doing something productive as a form of procrastination rather than looking for funny stuff on the internet? Here is my work flow:

1. When I review my to do list I always think about how long it will take me to actually complete something and how horrible this task actually is. With this little thought process I identify what kind of tasks I’m likely to avoid.
2. Procrastination is something you can’t really control. You will certainly do something that will be easy and effortless and still takes some time. Remember you’re trying to avoid stuff, as long as possible! When thinking about how horrible some of your tasks will be, you’re secretly also identifying the easy and effortless tasks. Your subconscious will probably hold onto them, because they are a lot more fun than the hard ones.
3. When you’re feeling the urge to procrastinate, instead of just clicking on one of your bookmarks or switching the tab to facebook, stop and think for a second. It really only needs a second to trigger these pre-considered easy tasks. “Oh, I would much rather do the easy xyz now”. Depending how pressing your hard task is, you can either give in to the sweet feeling and go off doing the easy task or you can stop yourself and say no to yourself.
4. If you already gave into the urge through clicking onto a link or going on facebook, say NO. “NO, I won’t waste my time on that now, I can do that tonight!” and close what you just opened. If the urge is still there, then you can rationally think “Let’s do something nicer for half an hour …” and go off doing your easy pre-considered tasks instead of the hard one that you’re trying to avoid.
5. If everything fails and you just can’t concentrate: Procrastinate! Do something that is not worth your time, watch something, read an article about a gadget you can’t afford, but please please set a time limit! One hour should really be the maximum that you allow yourself, because after that your concentration won’t come back. In fact with every minute you procrastinate the barrier of getting back to speed becomes higher. The longer a task is actually on your to do list, the harder it is to start this task!

If you are someone who is likely to procrastinate, then it would be unwise to ignore this problem. Every time you allow yourself to not take this problem seriously you lose an hour, maybe even two. You really don’t want that kind of productivity drain on a regular basis! Procrastination is healthy and can be used to your advantage. It can tell you when you’re getting bored and when you should switch your attention to something else to keep your concentration levels up. It can tell you that you might want to change your job and it can even help you to get other chores done. This is another perfect example, where conscious effort can turn something that is considered bad into something that is good for you. Live consciously and you will experience a lot of other examples of this principle!

How do you deal with procrastination?

Check out the other articles featured in the productivity week:

• Why being busy isn’t necessarily being productive
• On the meaning of productivity
• How to make your procrastination productive –
  Part 1
• Productivity tips from a busy bee

Immediately before I came to Sussex to study Computing and Artificial Intelligence I probably had the busiest time of my life. I finished some essays for my courses abroad, wrote a dissertation for a course in Germany, learned all Italian grammar for an exam, cleared out my flat full of stuff that accumulated in the 6 years that I lived there, painted the place, pulled the floor out, sold or gave away most of my furniture and did all the reading and writing for my Bachelor thesis. All that I did in just under 6 months. When I left Germany I was shattered. I didn’t have any privacy for about a month, because I basically wrote my Bachelor thesis while either sleeping on my Dad’s or my Mum’s couch. In my last holiday at the Baltic Sea I usually spent half the night writing my thesis. In the last two or three weeks in Germany I basically went tango dancing every night, because I was so burnt out. I just needed something to balance me.

I have to admit that I’ve become much less busy lately. I only study one degree, I didn’t work at all last year and I actually relax a lot. If I relax nowadays, my mind is not working anymore: I even meditate to achieve this kind of calmness. The reason is quite obvious though: I’m ill and actually on something that might even be considered a holiday. My first uni year at Sussex studying Computing and AI and also the holiday afterwards were supposed to be my time off after this insanely busy time back in Germany. I tell you I wouldn’t ever want to do this again! It was just all a bit much, especially with the emotional strain of leaving a place which I considered to be my home. I know now that there’s no need to hurry.

In my “year off” I got an average of 85% (everything above 70% is a first class degree), while I was under a lot of pressure because of relationship problems. I found out that I’m very ill for at least the last 2 years now and for about another year to come and while I was considering to go back to Germany, because neither the new degree nor my new living situation was very pleasurable. Everything basically just blew up into my face. My relationship was over, my living situation was if considered realistically a nightmare for quite some time and the learning experience was just not worth the effort in case of the degree. I mostly knew the stuff already and it still took quite some effort to get good marks. If I had been happy with my situation and if I had had a more challenging first year, I would have done and achieved a lot more.

What have I planned for my second year in Brighton? Well, first of all, to be able to be productive you have to be in a position where you can be productive. You have to be in a situation where you don’t have to worry about things too much.

Preferably there shouldn’t be any financial issues at hand. I borrowed money from my parents for my tuition fees and we already agreed last year that they will pay for my living expenses until I finish my BSc as well. In general you should be in a position where you are mainly happy where you are. After one year of struggling with it I finally am quite happy with being in England. It gives me a lot more opportunities for my future and Brighton is also a pretty place with lots of things to do if you’re bored. My living situation will be a lot better than last year, because I’m going to live with 2 postgrads in a lovely house near a big supermarket and with perfect public transport connections. To make things even better I’m going to buy a scooter (it’s in fact a gift from my parents for my excellent average in my first 1 1/2 degrees) so that I will be even more flexible. There is no relationship that could blow up, because I’m single and quite happy with that, and additionally I also have much more friends in Brighton now than I had last year. And then there is the most important bit: the main aim of my productivity efforts is going to be a lot more interesting – in second year my AI specialization starts and I’m only going to have 1 or 2 straight Computer Science courses.

You see: I have analysed my situation and I’ve tried my best to improve my situation in all aspects that went wrong last year. Now I will have near perfect working conditions, if everything goes well.

So, what’s the plan for next year?

• getting the highest average in second year
• help first year students as a Peer assisted learning (PAL) leader
• write at least three 1000-2000 word blog articles each week
• do the reading for all the courses I have and for an additional course per term
• hand every coursework in on time and without the feeling that there would be room for improvement
• go tango dancing at least once a week in Brighton – more often if there are new tango dancers in town – and at least twice a month in London
• start running again as soon as my health permits it and take up tai chi
• join the Hacker Space in Brighton and attend all Brighton Robotics events to learn more about the topic, especially on the hardware side
• … to be honest the list goes on …

All of this will take a lot of effort to maintain. I will have to manage my time very carefully and I will have to make sure, that I do get enough relaxing done as well, because I’ll be ill for another half a year at least. It really sounds like I really need to start being incredibly productive as well, while doing it in a more intelligent way than my last time being overly productive. In the last month I actually thought a lot about how to get this done properly and I’ve tried to identify the most important tips that I gave to other people when they asked me how I managed to study two degrees at the same time. Here they are:

1. At the beginning of a work period (a new term/semester, the start of a new project, anything that could be seen as a real beginning) make a plan! Identify the deadlines and set the earliest and the latest start date to work on it. Why the earliest? Well, here is the reason:
2. Do one thing after another. If you switch tasks you will lose focus and that will cost you time. Try working only on one thing at a time for the entire week – if you have to start with a project at a certain time, even though you’re in the middle of another project, try only doing administrative bits until you’ve finished the other project, so that you can have a block of time allocated to the juicy bits of the next project. Never start too early or you’ll waste time, unless you have really nothing else to do.
3. One of my professors used to say: “Have courage to leave gaps!” I like to call it: Know when to stop. You can do 80% of a job in only 20% of the time. The last 20% are the hard bit to make it perfect and it will take you 80% of your time. You will be most productive, if you can be happy with an 80% perfect piece of work. In my last year I got 85% so I certainly “wasted” some time on perfectionism. Know when to go for the hard 20%, namely when being perfect will increase your skills. Next time it will save you time and the last 20% will only be the last 15%. Once I wasted an evening on getting the listings plugin working for LaTeX – now I only have to plug my source files in, specify the programming language and it will produce a perfect Appendix for a report. This saved me a lot of time on about 3 other deadlines where I had to hand in printed code as part of the submission.
4. Know when to say no! You can’t make everyone happy and you certainly can’t do everything. I often skip lectures if they’re wasting my time. To some lectures I will be 10 minutes late in a calculated fashion, because the lecturer won’t start talking about new things until 10 minutes after the start of the lecture.
5. Know when to say yes! Someone wants you to do something for free? If you can learn something from it, then say yes! Say yes, even if you don’t know how to do it (but do warn the person who’s asking), you will learn it – it will cost you a night or two, but if you really want it, you’ll learn it. To get my scholarship for this summer I wrote on my CV that I know C++. In fact I only looked at a C++ book for an hour 4 years ago. It was quite a struggle to pick it up, but it only took me about a week. Now I know C++ and next time I’ll be much quicker at doing things with it.
6. Write everything down: If you’re very busy you just can’t trust your memory. Additionally having it written down will keep you from worrying about everything all the time. If you don’t need to remember it, you won’t and if you don’t remember it, you won’t worry. Be careful not to lose your notes though and if you only keep an electronic record, print it: there’s nothing worse than losing your to do list!
7. Be tech savvy: Google’s text message reminders are free in England and probably also in other countries in the world. You can set up a Google calendar, which reminds you automatically whenever you add an item to the calendar, so that you won’t have to specify that you want a reminder each time. Use technology where it makes things quicker and easier for you!
8. Take breaks! If you just work and work and work you’ll soon have a burn out. Relax every day for at least an hour, even if it’s the last day before the deadline. A last effort will be only half as productive when you’re tired and hungry. Relax every week for at least one day. Declare this day as your day off, even if you might have work to do. If you really can’t get away from work for a day, treat one day as your day off and do only things that you consider the fun bits of your job. A day off will increase the productivity immensely for the rest of the week. 6 days of 5 hrs concentration is better than 7 days of 3 hrs concentration, right?
9. Value what you achieve! Don’t just treat everything as a to do list item. Celebrate success with a treat and treat yourself with a drink if you fail. All this matters, it’s not just things that you tick off! If you value what you do and achieve you have more incentive to do things and to do things right. You will be more motivated!
10. Don’t sacrifice your life! If you’d rather do something else than be productive, then do it! Spend time with your new love, go tango dancing instead of doing the last minute effort on a deadline, go out for a pint instead of reading that last article. If you rather want to do something else than what you’re doing all day, then it’s probably not worth the sacrifice anyway! If you really love what you’re doing, you won’t even consider it as a sacrifice to not go for that pint.

Being productive is a hard struggle and getting the balance right is probably the hardest part of this struggle. Believe me, you’ll be sick of it, you’ll even hate it sometimes. You’ll have melt downs when your carefully designed plan blows up into your face. You’ll have days where you can’t bring yourself to do anything, because you worked too hard for too long. Once you get the balance right though, you’ll love every minute! You’ll love ticking off these tasks, you’ll love the success, you’ll love that pint more if you know you earned it and you’ll especially love those people asking you how you did all this!

If you want to be more productive try reflecting about these 10 hints I gave you here. You won’t become more productive just by following some tips a random person gave you, no, you really have to understand why! Try to identify what behaviour of yours would be not a good idea if you follow my tips. And then ask where it came from and whether you really think my tip would improve your situation. Not everything works for everyone, so try and pick what you like and maybe try out the rest later, when you have time for it. What are your secrets for your own productivity?

Check out the other articles featured in the productivity week:

• Why being busy isn’t necessarily being productive
• On the meaning of productivity
• How to make your procrastination productive –
  Part 2
• How to make your procrastination productive –
  Part 1

Well, considering that you really shouldn’t be doing something that doesn’t interest you at all, we all know that every job and every project has its nasty bits. Things need to get organized, background information needs to be filed and if we’re not lucky enough to have an intern or an apprentice who we can torture with this kind of stuff, then we need to be doing this, even though there might be no deadline attached to it at all. It’s the things that just lie there in the “unsorted” pile and one day you will really hate yourself, when you’re looking for this one piece of information that you need really really quickly and you just didn’t file it yet! We know these things: they only take 5 minutes, but we really hate them and therefore they stay on the to-do list for about 3 months or even longer.

Do you sometimes feel as if these items get bigger and bigger and more and more on your to-do list? Well, that’s because you’re not doing them and so they accumulate. One day you will have a random-stuff-I-really-need-to-do-but-really-can’t-be-bothered-list. Right now my random stuff list contains: Paying my rent, paying my hosting bill and paying my deposit for my room in Brighton. For about a week I couldn’t even be bothered to have a proper look at the hosting bill so just now I figured out, that they will just withdraw the money. Imagine what dreadful feeling was already connected to this item after a week of not dealing with it! Now it will just solve itself: if I had known it would’ve been a lot less dreadful to-do-item! I have monsters of to-do items like “Go to dentist” (certainly sits there already a year) or another lovely one is “Call X”, which of course I never do so that in the end those people call me and complain that I never call them.

Approaches that don’t work for me

I tried a few things to get rid of those nasty items and to stop them from accumulating so quickly. There are several approaches that really didn’t work for me at all:

• scheduling the item: It’s already on a list, what would putting it on another list accomplish? It will only make me feel bad for rescheduling again and again! The feeling that it “grows” would be even worse after scheduling and rescheduling it.
• setting a day to do them all: Well, first of all, something else will come up and you’ll do everything to not start working on the list until the day is almost over. Then you’ll fail completing them all. Oh no, now the list seems to be already a meter long.
• ignoring them so that they will do themselves: This sometimes works if it’s only about calling people – they might call you first! If you’re living with other people, they might do the dishes! Your wife might bring out the rubbish! Your daughter might crash your car before you have to do the inspection! This won’t work for things that you actively have to set up though. Paying some bills, calling people you don’t know yet … ticking “first week of term reading” won’t tick itself, sorry to tell you!

These approaches didn’t work for me at all, but this doesn’t mean that they won’t work for you. Try them out and decide whether they are for you!

Approaches that sometimes work

• Telling someone else about it. I usually tell my Mum things I really need to do, because she remembers things and actually asks whether I have done them. To be honest she can be a real pain if you don’t want her to remember things you said

“Did you ask for an appointment then?” – “I didn’t get round to it …” – “You said you would though …” – “Mum!” – “Well, then don’t say you will be doing things, if you don’t do them …!”

• Setting yourself a deadline. For me this only works if the deadline actually has some consequences. For example if I have a coursework that is only due in 3 weeks, but I have to start it early so that I can do other coursework as well, then I usually don’t start it until it’s almost too late to manage to do all of them. Of course I always manage to hand them in, but it really takes me some time to actually start working if there is no real pressure. In this case I sometimes set myself the deadline, that I want to be finished by, say, Friday. On Friday I sometimes go to London for some tango dancing. If I can’t manage to get the coursework done by 6pm on that Friday, I won’t allow myself to go to tango. So, if I make it, I treat myself with tango and if I don’t I punish myself with not allowing myself to go. This gives me enough incentive to start early and get it done in time.

Approaches that always work for me

• Finding something that is worse. The one thing that kept my flat clean during exams was that revision was often worse than cleaning. Cleaning the bathroom is worse than doing laundry and some subjects are worse, i.e. more boring, than others. If you end up not wanting to do something, pick a worse task on your list and magically you’ll prefer doing the original one first. The problem with this is though, that the worst task will remain on the list.
• Try to not do anything for a day. I mean that you’re really not allowed to do anything, but those nasty tasks. No reading, no TV, no movies, no conversations with your family or your flatmates, no MSN, no facebook updating, and no, you’re also not allowed to go for a walk. This of course needs a lot of discipline, because you really have to stick to it then. If I do that I usually get those things done after about 5 minutes, because I just can’t stand doing nothing. I can relax, meaning I can do nothing and just lie in the sun, but if I’m not allowed to “relax”, then I’m pretty screwed!
• One for every work day of the week. If there are lots of those nasty things that I have to do, I do one of them on every work day of the week as the first thing in the morning or first thing after lunch (some people don’t like getting calls at 8 in the morning ). I just write myself a post-it the night before or before I cook my lunch and stick it to my notebook with all my to-dos. In the morning or after lunch I have to get them out of the way, before I’m even allowed to look at my a other to-dos!

Apart from telling people about it or finding something worse, all the other approaches that sometimes or always work for me need discipline. You can’t just expect that these things will get done somehow magically. There is no way around just sitting down and doing this stuff. Remember, you gotta do what you gotta do! Sometimes it’s hard and often I don’t have the discipline to keep the attitude of doing them every day up for long enough. The reason why these nasty little things accumulate is, because they’re nasty and we don’t want to do them! It takes discipline to do the things you hate anyway and I don’t know an awful lot of happy people who can keep up doing things they hate all the time. People who do things they hate without hesitation are usually bitter and unhappy. They think they can’t do anything that is fun for a living anyway and they believe that work has to be dreadful or else it wouldn’t be paid, right? If all of your tasks and your entire work week needs discipline and the worst tasks need even more discipline, you should really reconsider your line of work. If you love your job/work though and there will always be things that you won’t like. Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t want to do those ones at all. That’s normal! Just try to not let them get out of hand. If there is an item longer on your to-do list than a week for no other reason than “you can’t be arsed” then something has to be done about it or else you will regret it sooner or later!

Next time you notice one of those to-do-list-lurkers try one of these approaches and see whether they work for you!