Doesn’t matter how driven we are, sometimes we struggle with procrastination and I am guessing this transition to working from home doesn’t improve our situation that much. When it comes to putting off our work, let’s just say its a constant battle.
We convince ourself through all these excuses like tomorrow I am going to have more energy, tomorrow I will feel more inspired but the problem there is that tomorrow never comes because tomorrow we don’t feel inspired, we don’t have more energy and we continue to put it off until we don’t have any other choice to do it because the deadline has arrived and we have the pressure in our back or else we face the consequences for letting yourself procrastinate and the consequences from our boss, client, significant other.
Think what you are going through when you promise yourself that you will do something tomorrow … all the sudden at the moment, all the pressure, the anxiety, and the stress is alleviated, we feel almost productive in a way, we feel like we are actually making progress when we are not
As Steven Pressfield writes in the book call The war of art “procrastination is the most common manifestation of resistance because its the easiest to rationalized” we never told ourselves, we will never write xyz and instead we say, I am going to write xyz and then we say, I’m just going to start tomorrow.
In my years working from home as a entrepreneur, freelancer, independent contractor and even now as a new mom working for myself and getting back to work from home i learned a whole lot about how to avoid procrastination and I realized one of the most important things i’ve learned is to include a daily practice, a daily ritual that takes about 15 minutes.
I’ve followed the same 15 minute daily ritual on-and-off for the past five years. It’s crazy simple but it helps to kickstart my day, avoid procrastination & focus on my work for much longer periods of time. In this video, I am sharing this simple ritual and I hope you get some takeaways to apply to your own routine. Look below for all the things I reference…
My daily ritual starts with:
- Drink any leftover tea/ celery juice/ginger lemon from breakfast and if I am feeling like I am going to get sick, I will prepare my golden milk ( I am sharing the recipe here)
- Daily Quick Planning: Handwriting to-do list to organize all of my tasks and projects. I needed something tactical, and I like to highlight the 3 most important things I want to accomplish today. I also like to lay out my week to see the progress that I can achieve if I am staying in a task today. I also use an app but I mostly use it to collect things that I need to do
- Find solitude, peace, quiet, and no other humans which in a way it’s harder when you are a mom but I tried to plan accordingly with my family so I can get at least a few hours for full focus work because stillness motivates into action. I know its hard during this time so we need to be a bit creative so it’s helping me to use the noise-canceling earphones
- Put my playlist from Spotify: I like to pay deep focus or low-fi beats, I cant listening to anything with lyrics because it’s impossible for me to concentrate if my favorite song starts playing
- Do an internal check, most of the days I have the highest energy during the first couple hours of the morning so that’s when I do the most important tasks, the ones that if anything happens and I can’t work after, I will feel ok I done it
Those are the 5 things that help me avoid procrastination and to stay focus on my work. The important thing about this ritual is that it takes me less than 15 minutes to complete and once I have done it put me in the right spot to start with my day with all in
There is nothing magical with combining this things but it does help me to build the momentum to do the work that i need to do each day. Let’s remember repetition,inspiration and motivation! It was the repetition to do it every single day, inspiration and planning that help me to keep focus and motivation for getting things done and going to work.
Thank you so much for joining me here and reading this content, I am super excited to create more for you please let me know what do you think and if you have any other topics you would like to cover, research and share.
Bye bye, I am sending you a virtual hug.
Also published on Medium.
