ProcrastiNation: Increasing Productivity in a Digital World

Personally, I find that one of the biggest “black holes of time” in my life is Facebook. More often than I’d like to admit, I find myself flipping through an acquaintance’s photos from Aruba, harvesting crops in Farmville (shameful, I know), or perusing my newsfeed… all while I’m supposed to be productively working on a client project. My own Facebook habit has lead me to think about productivity and procrastination in news ways, as well as to develop personal strategies to increase the former and decrease the latter.

Anyone that uses a computer on a professional level is most likely faced with this common, everyday scenario: sitting down to start designing, programming, writing, reading, studying (or any combination thereof), you first must compulsively check your e-mail, Facebook page and other social networking, RSS feed, news and weather, favorite online store or Etsy, Groupon, chat program, and a myriad of other websites, message boards and blogs before beginning. For most of us, this behavior has become habit. We can barely remember the days before e-mail and social media: The simpler days when our desk was a place to sit down and work, rather than a portal to the outside world. Further adding to the bombardment of distractions, most of us are now connected to the internet via smart phone 24/7. In this climate of instant information access, instant communication, and instant gratification, it’s no wonder that procrastination is made exponentially easier than ever before.

Given the fact that online temptations aren’t going away anytime soon (in fact, they’ll surely only multiply as time progresses), the only real solution revolves around willpower. To eliminate procrastination, TURN THINGS OFF. Getting more done more efficiently isn’t about mind games or gimmicks: The real secret is to cut off the pipeline of distractions.

It’s impossible for most of us to go cold turkey on our bad, online habits, but just taking one or two of the following steps before you start working will help to decrease your procrastination/distraction and increase your productivity:

• Set up your space deliberately and carefully before you start: make sure that you have all the necessary tools to complete your project, that your immediate surroundings are clean and free of clutter, and that you have food and drink handy if you’re a snacker like me. In other words, eliminate reasons to get up and stop working.
• Close unnecessary programs and tabs in your browser: this means ANYTHING unrelated to your current project.
• Turn off iTunes, Pandora, YouTube (or the television) and take out your headphones. Try silence, it might work for you!
• Don’t just put up an away message, totally and completely sign off AIM, gChat or Facebook chat.
• Put your phone on the charger in the other room (you’ll hear it ring if something important happens, promise).
• Make a pact not to check your social media until a certain goal has been accomplished: i.e. you reach a milestone in your project and can take a break.
• Install two browsers: one for work use, and one for personal use. The work browser has bookmarks and favorites programmed for work tasks only.
• Make task lists of important action items, and stick to them… however, don’t use the action of making lists as an excuse to procrastinate.
• Every time you get the urge to hop online for a non-work related task, stand up and stretch instead.

Multi-tasking is a skill that many of us feel that we have mastered, however there is a clear distinction between multi-tasking and distraction. Many times, it is necessary to have “background tasks” running behind our primary goal: such as uploading and resizing photos while we simultaneously planning their placement in a layout. This is multi-tasking rather than distraction because both of these tasks contribute to the forward movement of the project. Background tasks that differ greatly from the primary task stretch our mental capacities too thin, ultimately leading to wasted time and procrastination.

In this “procrastiNation,” it’s easy to get caught up in distractions that take us away from our primary goals. There is clearly a need for balance in our digital/online/work life, just as in our life as a whole. We couldn’t and wouldn’t want to eliminate email, chat and social networking completely, but we would all do well to at least begin to evaluate the balance of these activities in the grander scheme of things. Start small and take a few steps toward eliminating distraction and increasing your personal productivity. As I've told myself when starting to get "social media panic:" Facebook will still be there when you get back from your work!