Daily Rituals of Serial Procrastinator
The Inversion mental model — thinking about the opposite of what you want — is a powerful tool. In an attempt to learn more about mental models, I decided to write this article in an opposite way. What should you do to be a great procrastinator. I procrastinated a lot when writing this article.
Believe it or not, but procrastination is not easy. You have to work hard to find new and novel ways to distract yourself from actual work. In this article, I will share my own daily rituals and tips that have made me a master procrastinator and will guarantee my future success.
Sleeping
Never go to sleep at the same time. If there is one thing that can make the biggest impact in your ability to procrastinate, it is your sleeping schedule. That’s why it’s important that you will never go to bed at the same time. Go to bed whenever you want. Evenings are for leisure time, if you need to get something done, the midnight is your best friend. At night, everyone is already sleeping, and you can watch Netflix without distractions. Nobody will judge you. In the morning you feel lousy and tired, you will not get anything done, and it’s a perfect state to be in if you want to be a master procrastinator.
Go to sleep after you come back from work. You are probably tired and all you can think about is sleeping. So, set an alarm clock to 20 minutes and go have a refreshing nap. When the alarm rings, turn it off and sleep a few hours more. That will create a positive feedback loop. Now, you will feel refreshed in midnight, and you can slack as long as you want.
On your days off, sleep at least until noon or longer. This will mess up your schedule even more. But at least you will be paying back the sleeping debt you acquired during the work-week.
Remote work means you can sleep during working hours. Remote work makes your life easy. You can sleep whenever you want. Even better, when everyone leaves the house, you can sleep in your bed. Wake up every hour to check emails and answer to chat messages. Don’t worry, at midnight you will have all the time you need to finish the tasks.
Doing things
To procrastinate effectively, you need to have something to work on. Procrastination is most effective, when you have something to worry about. You need to finish a task, present a report at the meeting, or finish your homework. This is the ideal situation to do some procrastination. Just do it tomorrow. You know that tomorrow you will not be able to postpone it any more, and the pressure will make you at least two times more effective. So, why spend time now if you can do it tomorrow?
Have at least 10 projects you work on at the same time. That way you will not get anything done. You will be procrastinating on each of the projects separately. Having many projects in progress gives you the right to be important and say to people: “I don’t have time. I’m too busy”.
If you need to get something done, wait until the last minute. That’s when you don’t have any choices. Once the task is done, you can procrastinate for days until the next deadline.
Start your day with a to-do list, where you write down everything you want to get done. The more, the better. A long list of to-do items will guarantee that you will pick the easiest and most useless tasks from the list that have low priority, and that means you can procrastinate.
Before you start to work, watch a few YouTube videos, just to get into the mood. You will find that YouTube is great at recommending useless but engaging videos, that can fill up the rest of your day.
Bonus tips
Never clean your desk. Every time you sit down to work, you will feel miserable. Being miserable will remove any wish to work on hard problems.
When you decide to change something, change everything at once. It’s not enough to reinstall a broken application — why not do a clean refresh and reinstall the whole operating system instead? But maybe you need a new laptop as well. Spend the next two hours looking for a new laptop, and a chair, and a mouse.
Say yes to everything. If somebody needs a lift, be a taxi driver for them. If somebody needs help with his homework, help them. You need ways to distract yourself from actual work, and the more you say yes, the more people will ask for your help.