Do It Today: Overcome Procrastination, Improve Productivity, and Achieve More Meaningful Things

Beating Procrastination
To me, the key finding from the study by Dianne Tice and
Roy Baumeister is this:
“The present evidence suggests that procrastinators enjoy
themselves rather than working at assigned tasks, until the
rising pressure of imminent deadlines forces them to get to
work. In this view, procrastination may derive from a lack of
self-regulation and hence a dependency on externally
imposed forces to motivate work.”
Self-regulation, self-control, willpower, are all things that we
overestimate. We think: “Yeah sure, I will write a novel in 3
weeks.”
In our minds, we’re all geniuses and mentally strong. But
when the work comes, we cop out. If you’re a procrastinator,
you can’t help but delay work. And that’s true for the small
and big tasks.

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Sure, everybody fears to step outside of their comfort zone
— that’s why we call them 
comfort
zones. It takes courage
to make a bold move. But it sure doesn’t take any courage
to complete small tasks like paying bills, printing out
something for your boss, doing taxes, etc. The truth is:
Procrastination has nothing to do with what you’re trying to
do — small or big, it can wait until later. It can always wait,
right? For me, completing tasks, went like this:
There comes a moment between the start and end of a task
—I call it the slope of procrastination—when you give
into 
one
distraction. And that’s exactly the moment you give
up being productive.
You start working on a task, you’re excited, you’re focused,
but then, after some time, you think: Let’s read the news for
a second. It always starts with 
just
one thing. Then, you
think: I might as well watch one episode of Game Of
Thrones. Then, a video on YouTube—and then 
another
one.
Then, a little bit of Instagram browsing. And so forth. It
always ends with a bang: “This is the last time I‘m