Procrastination is in many ways the blogger’s worst enemy. You haven’t uploaded a new post in a long time and have a small window to do it in, so you sit down hoping to write a few blog posts only to find yourself browsing around YouTube and watching funny videos of cats. Sure, those cats are often hilarious, but they aren’t going to make your blog any more successful, appease your impatient readers or earn you any money. This is a problem faced by many of us and it’s one of the biggest time (and therefore) money wasters that we deal with on a daily basis.

In fact, I’d say that there’ a good chance you’re procrastinating right now. Perhaps you sat down planning to write an article for your site, but then got distracted while you were browsing through the research. You maybe read a couple of unrelated articles, checked your email, then went back online to ‘close the tab’. Maybe you were just about to when you saw this article title and though ‘just this one more article’.

Well it’s time to stop, and fortunately I know just how to get you back to work. Below I’m going to share some strategies that can make it much easier to work through your to-do list, and by the end of it you should be back to work and have stopped putting it off. Then, whenever you find your eyes and mind starting to wander, you can just apply these same strategies again…

Step 1: Create a To Do List

The first thing you need to do is to outline exactly what’s required of you for today. By doing that, you will be able to better plan your day and you won’t find yourself putting things off because you’re not sure what’s best to do next. Make this detailed too so that nothing vague is on that list. For instance, don’t just write ‘write blog post’, but instead write the title and subject of that post. This way you won’t lose time deliberating on what precisely to write and you can disengage that part of your brain to just work through the tasks directly.

Step 2: Start With the Fun

You’d think that it would make more sense to start with the most boring or the largest task on your to-do list first would make sense, but in reality that’s often a mistake. Instead, try starting with the job that’s mot fun or at least most bearable. That way, you won’t dread getting started quite so much and you’ll be less likely to carry on putting it off. But then, once you’ve done the fun task, you’ll find that the whole list looks much shorter and more bearable.

And if you don’t have a fun or a bearable task on there? Well then find a way to make the jobs more interesting. If you need to do some writing for your blog, then you should try and make the posts you write relate directly to something that’s currently on your mind. Likewise, if you were putting off going to the gym, you could make it more fun by using new exercises or making a challenging routine to push yourself. However you do it, if you make the job fun and challenging then it won’t be so likely to feel like work and it will be easier to stay focussed on it. This is an example of working with your brain. There are more here.

Step 3: Don’t Check Your E-Mail… Or Anything

So you have your to-do list and you’re raring to get started with work. What do you do now? If the answer you were about to say was to ‘check your e-mail’ then that’s what you’ve been doing wrong. Checking your e-mail at the start of your ‘shift’ will mean you’re not focussing on your work right from the word go, and will create too many opportunities to get even more distracted (by thinking about what’s been written, or by writing a response). Instead then, make checking your e-mail a ‘reward’ and use the same attitude for making tea or doing anything else that distracts you from your main job (and only award yourself one at a time after you’ve done a good amount of work). That way, rather than making tea, checking your email and reading the news and finding you’ve done no work after an hour, you can do one of those things at the end of each hour and find you’ve finished most of your work by the time you’ve done all three.

Featured images:

• License: Creative Commons image source
• License: Creative Commons image source
• License: Creative Commons image source
• License: Creative Commons image source

John Miller is an expert at social media marketing. Having been in this field for over 10 years, he has sound knowledge of its working. A music lover, he likes listening to his favourite soundtracks in his spare time.