What is an efficient way to overcome procrastination?

In order to understand why you procrastinate, first you should have a strong desire to eliminate procrastination in your life and following the methods mentioned below will be helpful.

I. Track down your everyday activity

When I first started writing down the list of activities that I do everyday, it felt like a waste of time. But later while analyzing the one month data I clearly understood why I don't have enough time to do the necessary activities and it narrowed down to the bad habits that i had created over time.

I was spending most of my time in Facebook and was affected by the "Chain-clicking curse" where watching a video from Facebook will lead to YouTube in-turn to Twitter to see the trend and it goes on and on into loads of unnecessary browsing wasting your precious time

II. Understanding why we procrastinate

We procrastinate because of the habits that we create over time. When we work some random thought strikes our mind, it might be as simple as,

where to go for the next vacation?

and I go to online to check details of it.  It doesn't stop there, then to Facebook to see where my friends went and something else catches up my eyes and the clicks goes endlessly.

III. How I cured myself by changing my routine?

1. Keeping myself distraction free

a. Turn off internet: Most of my work doesn't need internet so turned off my WiFi whenever i work

b. Note pad: Whenever some random thoughts strike rather than searching it online I started recording them down in a small note and researched about them later

c. Setting Time limits: Started setting a duration to complete my work which helped me to focus more on my work, Even had set time on socializing with my colleagues spending not more than 5 minutes on unnecessary talks

2. Sustaining the habits

a. Tracking your activities: Its quite tough for me to write every activity now and then, so I spent half an hour every day before sleeping to write down the activities of the whole day splitting into hourly activities and do a quick analysis on where to improve next day. It looks something like this:

9:00 - 10:00 : Forecast Meeting
10:00 - 11:00 : Project#1 - Prepared the procedure

b. Prioritizing activities for tomorrow: This summary helps me in prioritizing the activities that i should be concentrating more tomorrow and I write down top 3 things that should be completed tomorrow

c. Monthly and Quarterly Review: then I started analyzing my monthly and quarterly data to continuously improve my productivity

(This article was originally written by Suresh Rathinam)