So how do we put it into action

As a quick recap, we have realized now that the two biggest impediments to procrastination are the complexity of the task at hand and our emotional state while trying to perform the task.

We have also realized that priming can be used to manipulate emotional responses to things and familiarizing and activating diffused state helps us learn better and be more creative.

For this purpose, I like to keep complementary content available. Complementary content is anything that is relevant to the current task that you are supposed to undertake that is in a format that is easy for you to consume. We produced videos, podcasts etc would fall into formats such as this.

For example, let us say that you have been procrastinating on working out for quite some time. It happens to almost all of us. This is when you must switch your viewing habits temporarily. That is, instead of watching any random movie, TV show or YouTube video, you carefully shift your viewing patterns to workout focussed content. This could mean that you watch a documentary of exercising at some point, a movie like Rambo at some other point or short workout videos on YouTube at some times. What this does is trigger priming. It changes your mental state into focussing more and more on exercising. Since you aren’t really focussing on working out but merely watching videos and keeping it in the background in your mind, it triggers the diffused mode and helps you think better about when to work out, what kind of workout to plan, what to focus on when working out. Doing this over a period of time will have you find yourself in a state where you soon begin to look forward to actually beginning to work out. It’s a clever emotional manipulation that almost always works.

This works for almost every thing. If you have to spend time studying something economics related but you can’t get yourself to, try watching a movie like The Big Short or The Wall Street(given that there is atleast some content overlap) and then go back to studying. It changes your focus by a huge measure.

It doesn’t even have to be a full movie or documentary for that matter. Whenever I realize that I have been putting off on cooking and ordering far too much takeout, I start watching small bursts of food related videos on youtube on a regular basis. In a few days time, I find myself feeling an itch to begin cooking for myself. Instagram is pretty amazing for this too. Tune your newsfeed to show you things that you want to focus on in the short term and you will notice a change in the way you think.

It doesn’t matter what the platform you use is and how frequently you use it. This basically follow the same principle as how you constantly think of the last movie you saw or relate to the lead of the most recent TV show you saw.

The key is to use priming, familiarization and diffused mode to allow enough emotional manipulation that you can get yourself to finish a task without sparing very little willpower.

Embracing the Routine

The reason you want to not test your willpower on this is because the end goal for this activity is to turn your task that led to procrastination into a routine and eventually a habit. Our tasks always change and we try to improvise ourselves to it, which is one of the reasons procrastination is triggered. Settling into a routine helps not trigger procrastination.

You may procrastinate against working out because you probably do not derive joy from it. But you never procrastinate driving your way to the office every day however mundane a task it may seen. We don’t procrastinate that because the thought never crosses our mind. It has by now become a routine and thats led to complete acceptance.

It is important to ensure that what you are doing helps you form a routine and eventually a habit because that is the ideal end goal as far as being productive is concerned. There are ways to ensure that you can generate a habit, which I will cover some other day.

Another great thing about this method is that, priming is such an easy step to begin with for any task that even if you still end up procrastinating, you would have at least ended up consuming some content that is relevant to what you were procrastinating on and that is at least some progress than what you would have achieved wasting time viewing some irrelevant content.

Also, it is thanks to these techniques, that I was finally able to finish writing this long piece. 🤷

If you liked this article or are just wondering if your click feature still works, you can repeatedly tap on the clap button to find out or also reach out to me on twitter. Would love to hear what else can be done to make the above approaches more efficient.