Procrastinating Again? How to Kick the Habit.

- Eliminate external distractions - put in headphones and listen to music. Sometimes I stop for air guitaring though.

- Focus - use Timeboxing to separate times when you'll work and when you'll goof off

- Deal with the Adversion to "Hard" Tasks - I personally procrastinate least when I take a huge task, split it all up into a list, and then do the absolute easiest part first. It's all about inertia, if you view something as a single giant task, it's going to be much harder to get started.

Too often people procrastinate because they picture a task as the total effort involved in a task (and doing it all at once) -- well anyone in their right mind would never want to make all that effort at once! In reality though it's a combination of tiny bits of effort that gets a whole task completed.

Edit: I was reading this article while procrastinating taking my sister-in-law to the DMV. Meanwhile, she discovered that she had forgotten to bring her passport (for ID), and couldn't actually go today.

Hooray for procrastination! :D

I've found that structured procrastination is extremely helpful in "just getting started" and once you are rolling you aren't procrastinating any more.

The basic theory to sum up, is to have some that feels giant and important and impending to avoid which allows you to work on other stuff to avoid it. The trick is to feel pressured to avoid something that really doesn't matter so much, even though it appears to on the surface. It's total cognitive hacking.