“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.” – Abraham Lincoln
You have 30 days until submission. You think it’s enough and you won’t need to pull an all-nighter. 28 days later, well, you are still designing and haven’t started on presentation, then the panic monster sets in and you complete your work in time but with 2 sleepless nights. Sigh, the story of every project.
Doesn’t this story keep on repeating for every procrastinator designer? Procrastination is not bad, it’s a process of designing where the design is evolved through a lot of changes, well that’s one of looking at it. But procrastination can be bad when it starts affecting our design and quality of work. Time management and presenting quality work is of utmost importance in our field, and as a professional, we can’t have the habit of procrastinating all the time. To stop this, we have listed 10 tried and tested ways to stop procrastination.
1. Plan your schedule
Time and again we make a schedule and fail to achieve it, why? Because we start procrastinating. But try this, prepare a detailed schedule of your work with enough small and long breaks for relaxation. Break your big task into smaller ones and understand your capabilities to do work. Give enough time for thinking, sketching, and designing but have a more intense working period for drafting it.
2. Use Pomodoro Technique
25 min – 5 min Rule
In this, you have to focus on work for 25 minutes and then take a break of 5 minutes for relaxation. 30 minutes form a set, you have to do such four sets and then take a long recess of 15-30 minutes. The small breaks let your mind reduce the impact of internal and external pressure on focus and flow of energy. Remember if you are interrupted in a set then abandon the period and start again. If the work gets complete before the 25 min mark then start reviewing your work. The stages of planning, tracking, recording, processing, and visualizing are fundamentals of this technique.
3. Get rid of distractions
Distractions are the devil you have to conquer. Your phone, friends, coffee breaks, other people’s projects are all that is needed to break your attention. While designing, seek a place where you will be least distracted by the outside world, block your social media apps, and focus on the work at hand. There is always a fear of missing out on other things that you could do while not designing, but it’s just you trying to avoid your present work.
4. Use Incentives
Incentives help build motivation and engagement. Incentives help build your morale and make you feel appreciated and rewarded for completing the work in time. Reward motivated behavior makes you feel good and happy and drives you to push forward by doing more work each time.
5. Get a Work Buddy
Sometimes working together is the best way to learn and complete work. You motivate each other to work, solve each other’s problems, provide moral support for a daunting task, and keep the distractions at bay. A work buddy is an unstructured and free knowledge sharer and motivator for you. It’s mutually beneficial for both and increases productivity. But do make sure to handle each other’s work depression.
6. Detox and Rejuvenate
Take a break from all electronic mediums, pursue your hobby, refresh yourself for the work ahead of you. After or before submission, enjoy and reward yourself so that you feel motivated to do other submissions. This lets the body energize itself for the work ahead. Monotony in life makes you unmotivated.
7. Use Eisenhower’s Urgent/Important Principle
This principle helps you identify the projects that you should prioritize and focus on, as well as the ones you should ignore. It lets you identify urgent issues and order your timetable as per that. Divide your work into four categories as urgent-important, urgent but not important, important but not urgent and not urgent, not important. This listing will help you filter the noise from your decisions and concentrate on what needs to be done first.
8. Get your mood setter
Get on with your favorite playlist and start drafting your sheets. Research has proven that music helps certain people focus and calm them down to work efficiently. It also helps in blocking distracting noises from our surroundings.
9. Set Smart Goals
Time and again we make a schedule and fail to achieve it, why? Because we start procrastinating. But try this, make a detailed schedule based on SMART. Specific, measurable, action-oriented, realistic, time-sensitive. Understand your capabilities and design a schedule as per that.
10. Face your fears of failure and forgive your past procrastinations
your design might be flawed but if you do work on it consistently it will get better and better. if you work at the last minute you won’t have time to execute it properly and you will regret your work later on. The path to success is full of entanglements, mistakes, successes, and perseverance.
