Procrastination
Making Tasks More Pleasant
An under-discussed key to reducing procrastination.
Posted August 12, 2019

If you hit a dog a few times, s/he’ll learn to avoid you. Similarly, if your experience in doing tasks is often painful, you’ll soon avoid them. In other words, you’ll become a procrastinator.
The following may help replace your mindset that task = odious with task = neutral or even pleasant.
1. Adapt the task. Where possible, choose or adapt tasks so they capitalize on your strengths and skirt your weaknesses. For example, let’s say your boss tells you to create a report. Your co-workers' similar reports are replete with quantitative data analysis but you’re bad at those and better as an interviewer and storyteller. You might ask your boss if your report might at least partly include some interviewing and an anecdote or two. And for the quantitative part, instead of trying to struggle through it yourself and probably it still ending up worse than in your colleagues', ask a quant to help you.
2. Build-in the pleasant. Do the task a more pleasant way. Beyond just adapting it to your strengths, would it be more fun if you did the task while listening to music? If you did it in 10-minute bursts followed by a few minutes of playtime? If you charted your progress, like with a thermometer with the baby steps on the side to be colored-in? If you adapted the assignment to suit your interests? For example, let’s say your spouse tells you to clean out the garage and you dislike cleaning but like building things. Maybe you could be motivated to clean up the darn garage by buying and assembling an IKEA cabinet to store stuff you want to keep.
3. Use the One-Minute Struggle. Perhaps the most potent way to convert a task from yucky to at least tolerable is what I call the One-Minute Struggle. What makes tasks particularly odious is reaching a roadblock and being unable to get past it. So you sit and, for example, stare at a computer screen forever waiting for inspiration that never comes.
In the one-minute struggle technique, you struggle with a stumbling block for just one minute. After that, if you haven’t made progress, you choose one of these:
a) Continue struggling for another minute.
b) Get help.
c) Decide you can do the task without solving the roadblock.
d) Come back to it later. You may be more likely to conquer it with fresh eyes and the benefit of having done more of the task.
Using these three tactics can make procrastination-prone tasks more pleasurable. In turn, little by little, the idea of tackling a task will be associated less with misery and more with at least neutrality plus the good feeling and benefits of getting the darn thing done.
I read this aloud on YouTube.