Procrastination and Me Link to heading

Procrastination and I have been long friends. Our romance had been “on” even before I knew what Procrastination meant. Waiting until the last moment to really work on something. Putting something off ‘for tomorrow’, or ’the next hour’, or ‘right after I have some tea’, or ‘just after this YouTube video’, and the most recent ones but 1000 times more toxic one’s ‘just after this next reel/short’. If I try to think back over my earlier years, I can clearly remember one science class in school (don’t remember the grade, maybe 6th?) where I had not done my homework and the teacher was going around the class collecting homework. I remember my fear while she was coming towards my desk, I remember acting all frantic and trying to locate the homework in my bag in front of the teacher. I remember lying that I have done the homework but have forgotten it at home and then apologizing profusely, promising that I will get it tomorrow. I was playing the day before and had decided to do the homework later, and had forgotten all about it until dinner. Because I had gone out to play after telling my parents that there was no homework, I hardly could have admitted that there is something now. So I slept, and the next day the event took place. If you are wondering, why didn’t I just do it without telling my parents, it is because I couldn’t have done it without them knowing. We lived in a one Room kitchen, and we were always under my mother’s and later at night even my father’s watchful eye. I think that is my earliest memory of Procrastination. It also puts light on parenting at our house while I was growing up, I don’t wish to alarm people into thinking I was subjected to cruelty, I was loved by my parents. But they were particularly strict about education and homework! I have come a long way since 6th grade, and still the problem has stayed.

Source of Procrastination over the years Link to heading

As the years has gone by, and with the advent of smartphones the problem had multiplied (at least for me). Back in the day (pre smartphone era), my fallback for procrastinating was usually to read some fiction novels, or go out to play. There were odd times when I would just lie down and do nothing, but that was an exception rather than the rule. And being limited in my resources I did not have unlimited books to read from. I did not even have the energy to play all day so I used to, commonly, rule out my distractions fairly easily and come back to things that really needed doing. TV time was controlled by my parents, so I couldn’t have had unlimited TV hours. I did not have a personal computer until very late in my life, and even when I did get a personal laptop when I was in my 12th grade, internet then wasn’t as enticing and addictive as it has now become. I think it was also the fact that in India even until the early 2010s internet and laptops were not a norm for every household. We used to, commonly visit cyber-cafe’s to do something on the Internet and had to pay 10Rs per hour to access emails or even use Orkut and Facebook. Orkut was the rage when I was in 11th and soon Facebook became the new rage by the time I reached college. But procrastinating on the internet was not feasible due to lack of infrastructure and even opportunities. With the advent of smartphones and the rise in social media, in a span of 10 years everyone now has access to internet 24x7. The threshold to simulate your mind which back in the day involved reading or playing, has now transformed into swiping over my mobile device and watching a short video. I don’t think reading a fiction novel is better than watching Instagram reel, but I do think focused reading takes effort and energy, and the mental simulation is a more involved activity where you are actively imagining a world and working with characters as the story progresses. Whereas while watching a reel, the simulation is instant and the effort it takes on your end is negligible. So it isn’t a surprise we find people getting addicted to these reels and YouTube shorts. The threshold to “simulate” your mind has reduced drastically. It is easier to scroll Instagram and give yourself the dopamine boost than it is to give the same dopamine boost by finishing a task. Instagram or YouTube or TikTok or twitter aren’t the only place where this happens, I have personally done this on LinkedIn and some popular News websites!

Becoming aware of the Problem Link to heading

A few years ago, I started to notice a pattern in my life where I would avoid working on difficult tasks, sometime for weeks and would spend most of my time on social media. It was during the time I was pursuing my remote masters and every other week we had assignments. During the same time in my office, I had a lot of deliverables assigned to me, since I had changed my team and the pressure to gather context and become productive was overwhelming. I started getting stretched to my limit with so much to do and having to prioritize things daily. I ended up most of the week not doing anything, spending time in meetings, spending time on my phone, and having to work crazy hours to meet commitments by the end of the sprint, and then having to work overnight for college submissions. After 3 months, I started realizing that it is a problem and I need to figure out a solution for this. I had not suffered because of this, either in my job or in my college assignments, because I did meet my commitments or would have an honest explanation on times I could not. But every time it did happen, I wondered why did I allow things to come to this. And yet the next time I was there again, having to finish lots of things in a span of few days.

Instrumentation Link to heading

I was conscious that I was wasting my time, but I wasn’t sure how much in actual numbers. And I wasn’t even clear about my reasons for wasting time. I have always enjoyed problem-solving and coding, and I was required to do just that. And still I was finding myself in a position where I would regret my behavior after 2 weeks. After 2 week of conscious observation, I realized that the problem is twofold.

  1. I had a lot to do, there was lack of clarity in what I should do first, and figuring things out, planning and prioritizing was not easy.
  2. It was easier to distract myself by using my phone, and looking at some memes, or chatting with some friends or helping others figure their task out.

I also realized that I was spending upwards of 5 hours per day on my phone. I was spending hours playing Chess. I was spending hours browsing YouTube and Instagram. I used Android’s Digital wellbeing to get the statistics. So I was wasting time using my phone as my primary source of distraction. I thought that may be working on my distraction will make me more focused and in turn will solve even the 1st problem.

Digital Wellbeing Link to heading

Android has a very awesome feature called Digital Wellbeing. It allows you to monitor and even control the time you spend on your phone. You can use it to limit the amount of time you can open an app, and also use it to disable apps all together during specific windows or after certain minutes/hours of usage. It wasn’t an easy change, my mind would rebel against myself. My phone usage had become a habit. I had to resist my urge to disable the settings all together. I realized that after blocking apps, I was spending more and more time on websites, where even though my phone usage had dropped, but I was still spending significant time on my phone. After some changes, I started using this feature even on websites, no more 9gag for me after 20 mins, no more Hacker news for me after 15 minutes, no more Google News after 10 minutes. I felt like a tyrant to myself, but I reasoned that it is self-discipline. After some months I realized my habits had changed, I wasn’t spending so many hours on my phone, I even removed the entire thing once my phone changed, only to find that slipping into those bad habits are very easy, so I added back the limitations. I started using this feature primarily to limit unwanted usage during office hours. But having used it for over four years, I think I am now a power user of the feature, and I also use it to limit my phone usage after I am home and to ensure I am not obsessively checking my Emails, or to ensure I don’t stay on my phone post 11pm.

Todo Link to heading

But the important question was, did the Digital wellbeing really solve my procrastination problem? Not entirely, I hoped that removing distracting would solve both my problems, and to some extent it did, but I had to still work on the bigger problem of prioritization. Because of my Digital control, I started having more and more focused hours. I started getting more work done during those times, but there were still sometimes where I would not work on the task at hand. I understood that the reason for that was lack of clarity and no clear direction of execution. I was convinced that I had to establish a routine and “define” it to remove ambiguity from my day-to-day prioritization. After some trial and error over a period of months, I came up with the following execution Paradigm.

I realized that my work usually has 3 stages to it.

  1. Unknown: These tasks require doing, but are unbounded. It is unrestricted and Unknown. The scope is not clear. It involves research and is not straightforward. Sometimes it might involve defining the problem itself.
  2. Straightforward: These are task that are just execution. Well-defined and known. These are task you could spell out for someone to do.
  3. Monitor/Discussion

I realized I procrastinated the most on the Unknowns, so I decided that every day I will spend the first few hours on the Unknowns. I will try to define them, break them, scope them into either smaller Unknowns or Straightforwards. If I need to collaborate with someone to figure it out, I would work on it till I can independently and move it to Monitor/Discuss. After the first few hour(2 hours, in my case) of this. I move my energy to Straightforward, and because of the nature of work here, these get churned without much thought. This is pure execution, with very less problem-solving. Between multiple Unknowns I always pick the one which I feel is the most important for today, unless explicitly priority has been defined by the stakeholders.

At the end of the day during meetings and discussions I will update the tasks in my Monitor/Discussion section and move them back to either Unknown or Straightforward

Here is a sample Todo list categorization which I use

## Order of execution

1. First work on the Unknowns and try to move them to **Straightforward** or
**Monitor/Wait for Reply**
2. Then work on **Straightforward** and move them to **Wait for Reply**

### Unknown 🎯🌀
- [ ] Superbase vs Firebase, or Native Server?
- [ ]

### Straightforward 🎯
- [ ] Fix StandardError during Storage limit breach
- [ ]

### Monitor/Wait for Reply 🏓

Results Link to heading

The above approach has helped me get focused and avoid procrastination by defining a routine to approach my work daily. It is still a Work in Progress but I have reduced the amount of time I ended up spending browsing the web because of lack of focus. I have not stopped using social media all together, I have just defined a place and time where I intend to do just that, as opposed to doing it every other minute of the day. It has increased my overall personal satisfaction from my work and my leisure!