From Procrastination to Concentration: Advice from Our CTO & Community

“I add all the things people ask me to do during the day to a Producteev workspace. Then I keep 2 hours at the end of the day (or the next day) to do it” – Aric Lasry, CTO.

How do you effectively deal with procrastination? At first, our CTO’s answer sounded like the very essence of procrastination. I had to dig deep to understand it, and I’m glad I found an interesting method (image at bottom of post) to help make sense of his feedback.

There is a difference between tasks that are hard to finish and hard to get to. Hard to finish implies that a task is intense and feels like it’s draining your brain cells. Hard to get to, on the other hand, is often mis-categorized in the realm of procrastination. 

There is yet another difference, perhaps so slight that it is hard to detect, between procrastination and time management. The latter can be misunderstood as the former. This is how I misunderstood what Aric said. His process for completing tasks actually resembles the Zone Quadrant, one of the four quadrants you should read about.

The concept of moving responsibilities from one quadrant to another can be tricky. So to get tasks in the desired, or “good quadrants” — those being high demand/management and The Zone/focus, the following environmental and behavior modifications can go a long way. 

Though some, including author of said method, recommend things like saying “no” and delegating more to cope with an overwhelming to-do list, we recommend:

• relaxation techniques
  • breathing
  • stretching
  • closing your eyes
  • aromatherapy
• careful music selection
  • depending on urgency
• disconnecting from devices

But don’t take it from us, check out these amazing responses from our community!

You’ll want to check out the full article The Four Quandrants to Help You Prepare to learn more.

Photo credit: College Grad Life