Avoiding procrastination: A guide to living better

Learn how to become more focused and eliminate procrastination from your life

Modern techniques.

The ideas of “deep work”, “atomic habits” and consistency have been propagated through social media and have become popular. Many who tried these techniques saw a rise in productivity, so surely they are effective.

However, they all have their advantages and disadvantages. Before dwelving into the pros and cons, let’s understand how they work.

Deep work

The idea behind deep work is pretty straigthforward: being so focused on your current task that time seems to fly by. Getting into the “flow state” requires:

• no distractions (not even ONE!)

• passion or drive for the current activity

• having a challenging task, but not too difficult

All these conditions need to be met for you to enter the “flow state”. That’s why you can’t deep work every minute or hour of the day - you need to dedicate yourself to achieve it.

To make it easier to enter the state, it’s better to start with small intervals of time - 1 hour, 90 minutes, 2 hours. Get that phone out of the room and tell others not to disrupt you. Be careful, because as hard as it is to enter it (it will become easier with time), as easy is to break it. Just a small glance at your phone and your attention is no longer 100%.

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

Atomic Habits

Popularised by the book with the same name, the concept of “atomic habits” represent another way to start a new habit. The novelty of this technique is reffering to the idea that small habits compunded over time can yield massive results.

We all might know that unrealistic goals and doing “as much as you can”, often going to the extreme is not reliable, at least not if you’re trying to start a new habit. That’s where atomic habits come in.

Simply put, every day you are going to do 1% more than the previous day. That’s simple, right? Yes, and more than that, every time you are getting closer to completing that task, the momentum will push you forward.

Photo by Steven Lelham on Unsplash

Let’s say you want to run at least 2km every day. The first day you prepare your shoes, your equipment. The next day you go on a 5 minute run and so on. It may not be like much, but with time you’ll progress.

The trick is to make any good habit satisfying and easy to do and every bad habit difficult to perform.

That’s how modern techniques influence the notion of productivity. Both “deep work” and “atomic habits” are effective if you want to get more out of your time.

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