Overcoming Procrastination

Procrastination is something we all have done somewhere in our lives either intentionally or unintentionally. We all have started or tried to form a new habit something like to eat healthily, saying no to fizzy drinks, a morning walk or completing the projects in small chunks we quit doing after several days why? Because of the procrastination monkey in our heads. If you’re like me doing similar things in the past, I believe the answer will be “all the time“.

Forming a new habit is way too hard, it may look easy but trust me maintaining the habit is hard. We all know how difficult is to live with a healthy lifestyle. If it were easy, everybody would’ve done it. It’s a common understanding that if we start small then the chance of succeeding is much higher than others. But very few people follow up the advice of starting small; usually, everyone tries their best to start big and show off in their community about their ventures which ends up in a disaster. Why? It’s human nature that we get too much excited about making a change or doing new things. When we dream big about changing our lives and start working in small chunks the excitement usually takes over.

Preventing procrastination and excitement:

Getting excited is not that bad according to me, we just have to remind ourselves from time to time why we started this project to stay fired up. Because when things go little sideways we lose our excitement. In order to start a new habit or learning a new skill, we shouldn’t feel it as a challenge. The habit we’re trying to maintain should be easy; if it’s not then we all go in procrastination state and the goal of that habit is lost somewhere in the past.

I was also somehow following up procrastination until my mentor at Amal gave me another challenge ´The Pomodoro Challenge”. It was neither difficult nor easy to complete. This was a mental exercise which was quite hard for me to follow up.

For those who don’t know what a Pomodoro challenge is; it’s a time-based challenge in which we’ve to switch off our communication devices and we don’t have to use any social media as well; as it’s a distraction from the work. I had to work for at least 2 hours with 3–5 minutes break after every 25 minutes in this challenge.

Before starting this challenge Thanks to my technical mentor in Germany “Mr Ardit Sulce“ for teaching me up a new language and teaching me how to code the Pomodoro application. Huge shout out to him for that. I programmed the application to block any social media from 8 am till 5 pm as it’s the most suitable time for a person to work.

As far as the result is concerned I was not surprised at all to see that I was more focused on the work rather than wasting time on Social media and checking up my WhatsApp Messages. I was able to utilize my time better and gain more out of the same amount of time by just working for the prescribed time. The best thing about that was to Just Start and not thinking about the outcome. I remember Ma’m Jacquline Novogratz words ”Just Start and let the work teach you” fits in this situation so well.

There was an online course I was trying to start it from quite a while and thanks to this Pomodoro challenge. I was able to complete 60% of that course with notes in just one day. Just because I followed up the Pomodoro Instructions.

I definitely intend to repeat this exercise on a daily basis and also will advise others around me to give it a try and see the results themselves. I believe they’ll be shocked to see the results of the challenge.

Although the challenge instructions were to focus on work for 25 minutes and then take a break for 3–5 minutes; I intend to change these 25 minutes to 1 hour or 2 hours and taking 10 minutes’ break.