Dr Amantha Imber: How to beat procrastination while working from home during lockdown
From digital distractions to time management issues, working from home has its downsides. Here’s how to stay focused and on top of your game.
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The average person checks their phone 96 times per day – that’s every ten minutes (assuming you sleep for eight hours every night and the glow of Instagram isn’t keeping you awake). And now that almost all Melburnians are stuck at home, there are even more distractions to lure us away from our work. Dishes to wash, Netflix to binge on, naps to have, children to home school, and so on.
But you can kick your procrastination habit with these tips.
Stop relying on willpower to stay away from distractions
Many people believe they can kick their procrastination habit with brute force and willpower. If you put your mind to staying away from distractions, then surely things will improve
Unfortunately, this strategy rarely works. Most distractions, especially digital ones, are designed to be addictive. They suck us in with random rewards, exciting noises, and bright lights, which provide our brain with hits of the feel-good hormone dopamine.
The less we can rely on our own willpower to rid ourselves of distractions, the more successful we will be at staying focused on our work.
To preserve your willpower and stay focused, download website-blocking software such as Freedom.to or Serene. These applications allow you to select the sites and software you find most distracting, and they lock you out of them for time periods of your choosing. You will literally have no choice but to get back to work because you’ll be locked out of everything fun and enticing.
Make your phone boring
Our mobile phone is a constant source of distraction, especially when working from home. When we are trying to get work done, the desire to do the “just check” of our phone every few minutes and check every incoming notification dramatically reduces productivity.
To remove the urge to do the “just check”, we need to break the habit.
One reason habits form is because the behaviour is easy to do. As such, one way to break a habit is to make the behaviour harder to do.
When it comes to digital distractions, if Instagram is front and centre on your phone’s home screen, it’s easy to make Instagram the first thing you check when you pick up your phone. But if you delete Instagram or move it to a hidden folder, checking your feed becomes a whole lot harder.
If you are serious about kicking your procrastination habit, delete all the apps on your phone that you find most addictive. If this idea feels overwhelming, try this strategy for just one week and see how your behaviour changes. If your social life falls apart without Facebook on your phone, by all means, reinstall it. But you might find things get a lot better.
Get back in touch with what actually motivates you
A big reason why we procrastinate is because we are not feeling motivated or excited about the task we are working on. To overcome this, it can be a good idea to revisit the three building blocks of motivation: Autonomy, Mastery and Connection. To stop procrastinating, focus on increasing one of these drivers of motivation which will make you actually want to stay on task.
You can increase autonomy by making sure you have choice in how you do your work. This might involve a conversation with your manager to allow you to have more freedom with how you complete the tasks that form part of your job.
Learning or even mastering a new skill is a great way to increase motivation. Think about what new skills you could learn while working from home and allocate time to trying to improve yourself.
Finally, human connection is critical for staying motivated. Try to connect with your teammates, which will probably be via phone or video calls right now. Prioritising human connection will make you feel much more motivated and happier while working from home.
Five tips to kick your procrastination habit:
- Download website-blocking software such as Freedom.to or Serene to keep you on task.
- Make your phone boring by deleting any “addictive” apps.
- Plant a virtual tree on your phone using the Forest app – set the timer for how long you want to focus on a task, and it grows a tree. If you succumb to the temptation to do a “just check” of your phone, you kill the tree.
- Make time for a chat on the phone with a teammate every day – human connection helps us stay motivated and happy at work.
- Increase your motivation at work by learning a new skill.
Dr Amantha Imber is the founder of Inventium and the host of the How I Work podcast.
Originally published as Dr Amantha Imber: How to beat procrastination while working from home during lockdown