4 Ways To Stop Procrastinating 1

You have a deadline coming near and you find yourself doing almost anything else except what you are supposed to do. You know you should be working, but you just do not feel like doing anything.

When you procrastinate, you squander away all your free time and put off important tasks until it is too late. When it is too late, you regret it and wished that you had started earlier. We all at one point in our lives have encountered this cycle.

Some people figured out a way to break out of the cycle and others are still trapped in it. In this post, I want to cover how I overcome procrastination and gained great results.

Break your project into smaller parts

One of the main reasons why you procrastinate is because subconsciously, you find the project too overwhelming. The project is too large in scale and you just do not know where to begin. When you break the project down into smaller tasks or parts, you find yourself being able to focus on one part at a time.

I know in software development, the smaller tasks are still quite large and will take some time to complete. Therefore, you can break each smaller task down into subtasks. You can keep doing this until you hit a point where it feels manageable for you. When you do hit this point, suddenly you will find yourself being able to tackle the problem because you can focus on one small part at a time.

Create a timeline with specific deadlines for yourself

Regardless if you are self-employed or not, you should create a detailed timeline with deadlines for yourself. When you have only one deadline, it is an invitation to procrastinate. It makes you feel like you have time and so you keep pushing everything back until it is too late.

To create your timeline, you can start by breaking your project into smaller tasks or parts. Assign a deadline to each task, that way you will feel the need to complete each task by the deadline. When you do this, you create the urgency to act because one task might depend on another. If the task does not meet the deadline then the following tasks will miss the deadline too.

Here is an example:

Your project is to write an app that accepts a user’s inputs and do action A, B, or C. You might break down the project in the following way:

Project

• Accept user inputs [deadline]
  • Determine what to use for input (e.g. text box, drop down menu, etc.)
• Parse user input [deadline]
  • Break down user input with a strict format
  • Account for variations
  • Validate input
• Perform action based on input [deadline]
  • Call the corresponding action from parsed result
• Action A implementation [deadline]
  • Research
  • Implement
• Action B implementation [deadline]
  • Research
  • Implement
• Action C implementation [deadline]
  • Research
  • Implement

Notice how the project was broken down into smaller tasks and each smaller tasks are broken down into subtasks. There are also dependencies between some tasks, which mean one cannot be complete without the other.

Tell others about your goal

Creating a detailed timeline helps get you to take action and work on your project, but it might still not be enough. You may push the deadlines of your tasks back and keep repeating it to the point where the deadline lose its purpose. This is because you do not have to be accountable except to yourself.

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 and just do it

At the end of the day, it comes down to taking action. You can think about the tradeoffs between various implementations, but if that is all you do then nothing gets done.

You need to choose one of those approaches and start working on it. When it comes to software development, 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 lost will keep you going.

I hope you found this post helpful to you. If you do, share it with others so they can benefit as well.

Was there something I left out, that you believe should be part of the post? Do you have a system that is similar to what I described and it is working out great for you? If so, feel free to leave a comment.

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