Get things done! 11 ways to banish procrastination and fuel your productivity

A productive day climbing a mountain

One common theme that I come across in many of the people and teams I work with is productivity.

It’s no wonder that this is such a popular topic - productivity is tied to efficiency - increasing the output of what you do for the same amount of input.

Time is the biggest input into everything we do, yet it’s also finite - we can’t grow more hours in a day, and our bodies and minds don’t react well to increasing the proportion of time we spend working, so the key to getting more done is being more efficient with the time we have.

If this were easy to do, everyone would be doing it. Most of these tips will help you TODAY, but like many things in life and business, being consistent over the long-term is key to sustainable results.

1. Recognise your Procrastination Triggers

Recognising procrastination is the first step towards dealing with it. The next time you know you’ve been procrastinating, look back at what happened. When did you first realise you were procrastinating? Before you realised this, was there anything in your thoughts and behaviour patterns that suggested that you were procrastinating? Were there any specific (sub-conscious) actions that you took that suggested you were procrastinating (e.g. opening Facebook, sorting out the papers on your desk, watching videos on TikTok?

Take note of these triggers. It will take time, but every time you recognise procrastination, look for the triggers. You will get to the point where you’ll consciously recognise the triggers as they occur, allowing you to intervene before you lose too much time.

2. Change your state

If you’re struggling to get your head into your work, you have to make the call whether it’s better to stick it out and hope things will improve, or to accept that right now, this very moment, your mind isn’t in what you need to do.

Sometimes we need to activate a circuit breaker to get out of this pattern of thinking. Simply standing up and walking around the office can jolt the mind out, and lead to a flash of inspiration. Or take a walk. Go for a run. Just break the pattern.

3. Clear the Cache

We have an absolutely amazing facility to store information that we pick up during the day - our short-term memory. But while this facility is absolutely amazing at storing information, it’s awful at recalling it when you need it.

It’s why when you sit down to try to get your head into a task, you’re suddenly bombarded with all the stuff that you need to remember to do. Reply to that email. Send over that report. Have that chat with your finance director. Send in your child’s permission slip. Buy some bread.

You are paralysed with the amount of stuff floating around, and the result? You sit there, overwhelmed, thinking about bread and unable to make a start.

And before you realise it, you’ve been scrolling on social media for the past hour, and NOTHING has been done (and you’re bound to forget the bread when you walk past the shop later).

What can help here is an exercise to ‘Clear the Cache’.

Spend 10 minutes listing EVERYTHING that you need to remember to do. Then, for each item, add an approximate time frame (today, tomorrow, this week, this month, this quarter, this year).

For ANYTHING that isn’t down for today, give yourself permission to forget about it - you can come back to your list tomorrow! Anything left, schedule into your plan for today.

4. Find the Very First Step

Productivity starts with the very first step

Larger activities can seem overwhelming, especially if we start to overthink them without committing anything to a written plan. We tend to get caught into the trap of looking at the big body of work we need to do, or visualising how we feel when we finish the activity, with no clue of how to actually tackle it.

Thinking about (and visualising) the very first step you need to do to get started (and maybe the next couple after that) can be all you need to set you off down the path, and sure enough, once you get started, one step leads to another.

5. Eat That Frog!

Brian Tracy’s book of the same name (recommended to anyone reading this) suggests that doing the scariest task that you least want to do FIRST. By getting it out of the way early, you spend less headspace thinking about it (or coming up with ways to avoid it) for the rest of the day, plus if you can do your scariest task, surely you can now do anything?

6. Focus on the 20%

Pareto’s law states that generally 80% of your results comes from 20% of your efforts. Do you apply this to your to-do list? We can sometimes get pulled into lower-level activities that aren’t going to get us anywhere. These can be time vampires when they are small things, but how many of us have created large, elaborate tasks to do that will give us relatively small gains?

These things may still need doing, but before you look at these, focus on the activities that are going to give your the biggest results. Once you’ve done these, consider the day a win!

7. Rest often

We push ourselves hard, and sometimes we think working harder and longer will give us more time to get things done.

Actually, taking regular breaks are essential for keeping your mind at its best. 10 minutes rest in every hour is usually enough to feel refreshed and be ready to carry on. It takes discipline, firstly to ensure you take the breaks, and secondly to limit them (and not lose entire afternoons when your mind wanders too far!)

8. Remove distractions

Getting your head down and into a larger piece of work needs a focussed mind. Distractions and interruptions (think: Message alerts, LinkedIn notifications, emails) are designed to grab your attention, robbing time from the task that you are trying to complete. And it’s not just dealing with the distraction itself - it’s the time it takes to get back into your work (anywhere from 6 minutes to 20 minutes, depending on the distraction).

Switch off everything that can distract you from what you’re working on NOW. Shut down your email client, close any browser windows and focus just on the task at hand.

9. Do one thing at a time

We are terrible at multitasking. Occasionally there are a handful of tasks, which can be grouped together, but generally, trying to do more than one thing at once is far less efficient than doing one thing at a time (think about the point above, each task you are doing is effectively ‘distracting‘ you from the others.

9. Meditate daily

Just 5-10 minutes a day will help you to become more focussed over time. This one’s definitely not a quick win, but practised daily and consistently you will start to see some improvement.

10. Be consistent

Explore which of these methods work for you (and you might also pick up a few more!). And the ones that work… they’ll absolutely make a difference today. But making change for one day is easy. Consistency and habit are key to embedding working productively into your daily routines.

For the techniques you decide to use, commit to trying them out, just for a week at first. If things are going okay, try another week.

11. Forgive yourself for not getting everything done.

How often do you get absolutely everything done?

To do lists - used correctly - are a fantastic way to be more productive, but they can be a double-edged sword when it comes to mindset. For all the tasks that we tick off the list (or just delete), there are usually a few stragglers left over at the end of the day.

You see the tasks left over and… failure. Can you switch off knowing there are still things left to do? And the effect of this happening day after day… you end up beating yourself and almost convincing yourself that you’re a serial failure.

It’s unfair to hold yourself to such a high standard. Instead of aiming to complete everything on your list, set yourself another target - maybe getting 75% completed, or even better, look at always doing your top 20% each day (see the point below), and seeing everything else as a bonus.