Trying to Avoid Procrastination

Little Andrew is naively looking for the most powerful tool which rules them all. One single tool that makes him more organized, more focused on his tasks and helps him tackle daily tasks with breeze. However he struggles to find one single tool that makes him better person instantly. Getting things done seems so easy but still so difficult. Will he reach the wanted empty inbox and good feeling about finishing tasks on time? We will see.

Why not wait till the last possible moment?

As you could guess this post is about time/tasks management. I must emphasize that I am NOT expert nor someone you should even consider learning from in this particular field. I’m lazy, always procrastinating and letting tasks slip to the point when I’m panicking.

Let’s start with a little bit of background. As far as I can remember I always have had issues with starting tasks, homeworks and projects in time. I don’t know why is that but I’ve never worried about homework or exam till the day before at school. The same story applied to my first serious job as a trainee programmer. I’ve never touched the project till the last moment when I knew I’m sort of capable to deliver.

Issues with this approach never really appeared until the end of grammar school. For the school-leaving-exam I was supposed to study a tiny bit longer and rush notes the night before strategy hadn’t looked so promising. I tried to plan a simple schedule. I gave each day a six hour window dedicated for studying. Then I divided the window by count of subjects I needed to go through. The result was an easy timetable that should got me through the exam. It would probably worked just fine under one condition. The condition being simple: sticking to the timetable.

Andrew vs Procrastination

Usually when I need to do something productive I end up being highly unproductive. Playing computer games when I was younger (god dammit World of Warcraft, gimme my hours back!), finishing given series in a marathon (can you watch The Breaking Bad any other way?), browsing web endlessly (ahh sweet memes), even cleaning my room (ok, why and why?) or just start to work on absolutely unrelated project when I’m older. Simply any other activity just to avoid completing the task.

And the time reserved for preparation for the school-leaving-exam was wasted. Or not? One can argue that the time you are enjoying yourself is not a waste. I’ll leave that up to you. At the end I passed the exam and haven’t learned a single thing about planing other than I like to procrastinate.

tomorrow a mystical land where 99% of all human productivity, motivation and achievement is stored

After grammar school my path continued to university. I imagined a lot of stuff mostly involving parents free life in a capital city. However 20 years old me got a hard punch right in the face. I used to worry just about one thing - school. Having good grades and not many absences. Suddenly I had to manage everything from place to live to food to eat. Combined with class homeworks I had so many tasks I didn’t know where to start. So I procrastinated again. But as the semester went on I started to fall behind. I had to change something.

At the time I used to procrastinate mainly by browsing different social media, fun pages and watching useless youtube videos. The problem was that these temptations were always there. Studying informatics most of my homeworks involved computer and there you are just one click from breaking focus.

I haven’t built a single project here!

That’s right. This was just an introduction to my next two posts which are going to be about building stuff. Don’t worry here. We are going to look at

• You Have no Power Here - chrome extension blacklisting websites
• Questing in Real Life - my current setup for managing tasks and projects