Hello and welcome back to The Bliss Bean. Today's video is on procrastination,
which is kind of ironic because I'm supposed to upload this video tomorrow
and I am planning, editing, and filming it all today. But that just means we're in
the same boat and we can both benefit from the tips that I'm going to share
today. Before I get started please make sure to subscribe to The Bliss Bean and
get notified about new videos that I make. Even though sometimes I do
procrastinate on putting them together I do get fun videos out every Friday
Okay so I procrastinated so much back in elementary school because we say that
procrastination runs in my family. So like one time we had to do this book
report and I came up with this super fancy idea that even my teacher was like
are you sure you can pull this off in the amount of time you have? And I said
yes,, absolutely which ended with me the night before, almost in tears, it's past
midnight, the printer's not working, my mom is yelling at me for staying up late, it
was pretty bad. Thankfully I did actually learn from those incidents and by the
time I got to high school procrastination honestly wasn't really a
problem for me. I really learned to get satisfaction out of getting things done
and out of the way early but for anyone who has struggled with procrastination you
know it's definitely not that simple and so this is why I'm making this video - to
share some straightforward tips that you can use to prevent procrastination and
to actually get things done. So first of all, I'm a firm believer that the best
defense against procrastination is planning. It's so much easier to get
yourself to go do things if you planned to do them in advance. So that means the
very first thing you need to do when you're faced with a project that's kind
of intimidating that you're tempted to procrastinate on is to write out a list
of the things that you need to complete for it. So whatever you want to use to
record those steps whether it's plain old pen paper or like your Notes app, a
tool like Trello just get it all out of your head and written down somewhere. The
important thing is to be detailed because basically the reason we
procrastinate is because we're intimidated / scared of the thing that
we're not doing and so if you write down "write report" on your to-do list, that's
definitely gonna intimidate you because that's such a huge project to
take on. You can start with that but then underneath it, break it down into much
more manageable little chunks, like find your sources, read and annotate your
sources, make an outline, write an introduction, edit for grammar, print the
report. Honestly don't feel bad about writing little tiny tasks on your list
because it just feels good to check things off your to-do list. But you don't
want to just let this list that you've written die somewhere you have to
actually go ahead and make it time-based. So you can either assign deadlines to
everything but I like to take it a step further and actually decide on what day
I plan to do each of those things. It's just much more concrete and specific and
you're making more of a commitment to yourself. So that's the first technique
is planning, second one is pretty similar but it's like planning on steroids.
Something I do usually on non school days but more like when I have lots of
unstructured time is I draw out what I want my schedule for the day to look
like. Basically you have your to-do list for the day and you have your calendar
which has obligations on it probably so then you take your to-do list and you
kind of block out and chunk out the free time that you have in your day and you
try to figure out exactly when you're gonna get everything done. This is super
effective because it keeps you from getting stuck on any one task. You see
your schedule and you want to keep up with it, you don't want to fall behind
which kind of motivates you to work faster and efficiently and to not waste
time on unimportant things. Third tip, the Pomodoro Technique. Literally I will
mention this in every video I make about productivity and I am NOT sorry because
this is a very important technique. For anyone who is uneducated in the art of
the Pomodoro the Pomodoro technique is basically just a simple kitchen timer
technique where you set a timer for 25 minutes, you work, and then you set a
timer for five minutes and you take a break, and then you repeat that for four
cycles, you take a longer break and then you repeat that whole thing. So why is
this helpful for procrastination? Well I think it's much easier to convince
yourself to sit down and do something for only 25 minutes then to try and
convince yourself to sit down and like hammer out the entire project in one
sitting. So just like you would take a really broad project and break it down
into more manageable steps the Pomodoro technique kind of does the same thing it
just makes your work feel more manageable and less intimidating and as
I mentioned at the start of the video we procrastinate because we are intimidated
okay so we've talked about a bunch of like planning, time management techniques
now we're gonna talk about the mindset. So basically tip number four is just
change your attitude and I think the best way to explain it is with a
personal example. It was a very average weekday evening and I was helping my
parents with their business, which is like my part-time job, I was getting
tired and then I started thinking about how I was gonna have to practice my FBLA
presentation after that and I was just like ughhh. So, I snapped myself out of it
and instead of thinking about how tired I was and how much I had left to do
instead I thought about what a lucky opportunity I had to be able to work for
my parents and make money, I thought about how practicing my FBLA
presentation I would get really really good at it and be ready to just kill it
at the state competition. Basically I just viewed both of these things that I
had to do as awesome opportunities that I was really lucky to have. So if you're
procrastinating because you're intimidated maybe you might just want to
attack the problem by teaching yourself to not be intimidated of it anymore so
The next tip is also something kind of mindset related, it is to imagine the
work as already being done I think a great example of this is exercise, it's
super easy to procrastinate that but this technique comes really in handy
because as we all know, exercise releases those feel-good chemicals and so if
you're procrastinating on working out the thing you should do is like try and
imagine how good and happy and refreshed you're gonna feel after you do this
workout. Other examples, if you don't want to clean your apartment imagine how
it'll feel to walk into your freshly cleaned, beautiful, airy apartment. If you
don't want to do an assignment for school, imagine how
you'll feel when it's all done and you're turning it in and you get that weight
off your shoulders basically how is the scenario going to
look, how are you going to feel, once this dreaded task is finally done. Another
thing that you should do if you're having trouble with procrastination is
to take care of probably the number one distraction that we have in our lives
Our phone. Four and a half hours of screen time per day on average. Obviously
sometimes we do use our phones for productive activities but a lot of it I
think is distraction and sometimes it's even distraction disguised as productivity
but I think everyone can benefit from taking control over their phone habits a
little bit so a few tips for that, whatever you have to do on your phone
especially if you're a blogger and social media is actually like part of
what you do and you need to check it and be active on it I recommend trying to
chunk all of those activities into one session of time, so like for me on
Instagram i will post a photo, reply to comments, to messages, and comment on
other photos all in one big chunk which usually takes me about 45 minutes. Even
if it's not social media, if you like check emails on your phone, set aside a
time to respond to all of them instead of constantly opening up your email
throughout the day. This is actually super related to something called task
batching which I have a blog post on so I'll link to that in the description
another thing to consider doing is making your phone grayscale, I actually
have that on my phone. It works differently depending on what phone you
have so just search up the instructions for your particular phone. Basically
having your phone grayscale just makes it way less distracting. You don't even
notice how addicting those colors are until they're gone, especially the little
badges that show up on apps with the number of notifications that you have
for that app. The red color is actually so enticing and once that color is gone
you just don't feel as tempted to click on the app. And then the last thing to do
with your phone is just get rid of it. Not, like, get rid of it get rid of it,
just have it out of your sight, out of the room if possible, literally just the
presence of your phone can be distracting and I think you don't really
notice that until you experiment with having it out of your sight and then
you realize how much of your, like, brain space is taken up simply by having your
phone there in front of you. Lastly phones are a distraction but so
are laptops, and this can be problematic because we do a lot of our work on
computers so a few tips for that - if you're doing some sort of work where you
don't need internet I suggest turning your Wi-Fi off. Another distraction
that's super common is when you innocently go searching for some fact or
statistic that you need but then you end up in the dark depths of YouTube and you
have no idea how you got there. So if that happens to you a lot when you're
writing or doing something similar consider using a placeholder to remind
yourself of what things you need to fact-check. You can use the letter
combination TK because that actually very rarely occurs in the english
language and so once you've written everything and you're ready to do the
fact-checking research part you just hit ctrl F and
you search for all instances of TK and it'll bring you right to everything that
you wanted to look up. Lastly for computer work it's still important to
remember to take breaks. I think it's easy to forget to do that because
screens are just kind of visually stimulating and they kind of keep us
energized and so we don't notice when we're starting to get sluggish and tired
and slowing down so I think the Pomodoro breaks still really come in handy but at
the very least just like know yourself well enough to know how long you can
work at a computer without your eyes and your brain getting tired and take a
little break. Before I end this video I just want to end with some words of
advice. Beatrice's words of wisdom. Actually these are more like Tim Urban's
words of wisdom but I'm paraphrasing them. One of my favorite TEDTalks ever is
tim Urban's inside the mind of a master procrastinator. In it he gives kind of a
metaphor for how procrastination works and one of the characters is like this
panic monkey that jumps into action when your deadline is dangerously close and
so he explained about how the panic monkey usually will save you in
situations like that but there are a lot of things in life that don't actually
have a deadline like maybe you want to plan a trip or start a business or
even take some time for yourself these are all things that we oftentimes just
put off and off and off and that's because there's no deadline, there's no
one telling us we have to get it done, and so there's no panic monkey making us
get it done. But then Tim Urban showed this diagram on the screen, it basically
represents every week of a 90 year life and this freaked me out a little bit
because it was just smaller than I thought it would be. It just reminds you
of how short life is, so when you're applying these tips I urge you to not
only apply them to turn in that paper on time or get that project in by the
deadline, but also to apply it to things you want to accomplish in life. I think
we all have lists in our heads of things we'd like to someday do. If there's no
deadline for something make yourself a deadline. Don't put off your happiness,
don't put off what you want to achieve in your life, do it today. And that's it
from me, so thank you for watching this video, let me know what you're currently
procrastinating on and what techniques help you stop doing that. I need to go
hurry and upload this footage so that I can get this video edited, exported, and
uploaded by tomorrow. I'll see you next week, bye!