Forem: Akash Shukla

How to stop wasting time: Lessons from a master procrastinator

Akash Shukla — Tue, 19 May 2020 07:31:51 +0000

I am a master at the craft of procrastinating. I have bestowed this title onto me having expertly procrastinated my whole life. From living life at the edge of deadlines to skipping huge opportunities altogether.But I have been able to find ways to bypass procrastination that have allowed me to do great in school, college, work.

How you ask? Well, without a dreaded deadline or without reasons with dire consequences, I never thought doing anything was worthwhile, just shackles resulting from living in a society. But whenever it came to things that I loved, for example: starting and running a club in college, reading a ton of history books, being a complete computer nerd and becoming a software engineer all while facing a crippling sense of procrastination and lethargy, I breezed through.

Through all my trial and error, I found a couple of ways that have allowed me to much more productive than I once was. These days, I have started a new habit- writing. And I would like to share some of the ways to be more productive.

This post is meant to be relatable to all those people who procrastinate around life, regretting doing nothing productive while having all the talent and motivation to be a productive member of society. I hope this will be helpful to those who are struggling the most.

1. Lists are your friend

Make a list of things that you need to accomplish. Write down all the habits that you’d like to pick up and the habits you’d like to curb. Seeing what you’ve been putting away for later on paper give you an idea of how huge or how small the task at hand really is.
This is a big one. When you have a list of things that need to be done, you can clearly track and check tasks off of it whenever you have a glimmer of energy to pull it off or whenever a dreaded deadline forces you to do it. Even more motivation comes to you when you see yourself going through the list and see a sense of accomplishment on paper. Pat yourself on your back when you check something off. You deserve it.

How to use lists effectively:

Use todo apps like Microsoft To Do or Todoist to keep track of your tasks.
Always add tasks that need to be done, even if they are very small. Adding a tick to those tasks definitely boosts your confidence.
Set tasks that you need to do regularly on a calendar app like Google or Apple calendar and set reminders. For example, add a task to your calendar that reminds you at 6:00 am everyday to do pushup(more like 10:00 am, who am I kidding).

2. You’re an adult, please clean up your room

A veteran procrastinator does not start a task unless they are riding a wave of accomplishment. Do you relate to not working for ages and then suddenly one day finishing up a pile or work just because you started one and rode the wave? Why not create a wave?
The most satisfactory and motivating thing to do is cleaning up your surrounding. Start with your room, get rid of all the cups and wrappers from under the bed, wash those smelly clothes. Cleaning up seems like a dreadful task in itself but actually it’s not that hard. Start small, put your laundry in the washer, probably change the sheets, take a bath. In an hour or so, your room will stop looking like a dump and you’ll definitely start feeling better.

So basically you do this:

Clean up your room
Clean up your work area
Arrange your shelves, cupboard etc
Make your surrounding as aesthetically pleasing as possible
Gather up all the tools that you need for your tasks etc
This accomplishment is profound to some, more like a reset(the kind all of us wish for every new year). After you have done this, after you have reset, you’ll probably have some motivation to do some more additional tasks from your list.

3. Gamify the process

Who doesn’t love a good old game? And good news, there is a good way to gamifying the productivity journey.
This method requires you to give points to all the tasks in your list.

For example:
Waking up early=20 points
Exercising=30 points
Finishing assignment=40 points
etc.

A serial procrastinator puts off tasks that require effort and are less fun than any mind numbing task they might be doing. For example, Netflix definitely seems much more better than finishing that paper you need to complete although you don’t know what to watch and scroll through everything watching 5 mins of every show there is(relatable much, hmmmmm?).

Why not start with tasks so simple, that it’d be foolish not to do them. Thinking about getting fit but have been putting it off forever, why not just do one push up today. Do something that requires the least bit of your effort today, then slightly do more tomorrow. A month in, you’ll probably end up doing 30 pushups.

Playing games with your life😳:

Assign points to tasks on your list
Give points to yourself(give partial points if you did things partially)
Aim for a daily goal of number of points to be scored
Reward yourself with points earned (For example, chocolate for 50 points, new shoes for 2000 points) etc. You deserve it if you see the progress in your daily routine.

4. Start small

Some serial procrastinators have high hopes of doing profound things, but they put it off to a later date. And when they one day try to finally get their life together, to try to do all the things at once. Not to anyone’s surprise, a greatly productive day is followed by weeks or months or non productivity. How does one fix this? By starting small and putting it in habit.

So at this point the whole post must have started sounding a little bit cliche and preachy but let me change that by sharing a personal anecdote.
The lockdown situation in my area wreaked havoc in my daily routine, there was no pivot for me drive my life around, except work. But I could work in the morning or at night. And everything else that was non essential did not have a fixed time. But cooking was one thing that I had to do everyday because I needed to cook for people and my lack of schedule could not harm other people’s eating routine. So even though I hated cooking, I made sure to cook at the same time everyday. In a month it turned into a routine. This allowed me to consciously focus on working on something since cooking had become a sub conscious effort, just like brushing your teeth or drinking water.

Long story short, starting with one single task until it turned into a habit allowed me to pick up other habits. Had I tried to pick up 10 habits at once, I would have definitely dumped all of them on the next day and my friend for whom I cook would have starved.

Tips in bullet points because you probably didn’t bother to read the whole passage:

Start with small or small number of tasks
Do it at the same time until you form a habit
Take up more challenging tasks when the previous task is no longer dreadful

5. Write a letter to yourself

Write a letter to your future self, describing in detail your expectations. Write a letter describing your current state and your hopes for the future. Write some words of encouragement and advice in case your future self is struggling, help yourself in the future.

Now in case you’re wondering that this sounds stupid and makes no sense, go to point number 6.

6. Do it all over again

One day or the other you are going to fall into your habits again, you are going to procrastinate just about everything and then think that if trying everything to be productive failed, there was no fix for it anyway. Fear not. This happens.

Read that letter you wrote for yourself. The feeling is profound. Reading letters from yourself is akin to reading the great literature that touches your heart. Now take that advice seriously. Do whatever you did, all over again; make a list, clean your surrounding, start small.
I hope you have a productive future.

Other cliche advices that kind of work:

*Try using social media less. It takes up a huge chunk of your time. One advice for youtube addicts is that you should close your app when the video is over. Saw something awesome in your recommended list and you’re enticed to continue watching? Add it to watch later. I’m pretty sure you are not going to end up watching most of them anyway.
*Share your progress with others. It makes you happy.
*Tell people that you’re going to start doing something new (accountability surely helps).

Don't be a tutorial junkie: Read the docs!

Akash Shukla — Mon, 18 May 2020 21:02:01 +0000

Tutorial Hell:

A place where you get stuck when you go from one tutorial to another building basic projects while not gaining confidence to build one on your own.

The Problem

Well, we all come starry-eyed to the world of programming, looking for the good old tutorial. But most get stuck in the constant loop of trying out beginners tutorials. Probably you are switching languages or learning another framework you want to try out. One beginners' tutorial after another, you feel like you are not going ahead.
The problem with learning programming with beginners' tutorials is that they start from the rock bottom. And while it is a good thing for beginners, once you have learned some fundamentals in a tutorial, it's counterintuitive to go back to another and learn the same thing all over again.
This happens with experienced programmers as well. Suppose you are experienced with C++ but would now like to learn Java, its frustrating to go through tutorials that explain fundamentals that you already know at a snail's pace.

The Solution

Read the Docs

I was once, a long time ago, a tutorial junkie. While I loved programming and building projects, in a matter of another language or framework always caught my attention. Then I meticulously scraped through stackoverflow, reddit and medium posts to figure out the best resources and the best tutorials and trying out multiple of them. And after learning the bare minimum and building the prescribed project, I moved along. Pouring so many hours and having learnt no more concepts than I previously had known frustrated me. I only got out of the rut and finally moved ahead when I spoke to other developers.

This is what I learned.

1. Complete what you start

This is pretty simple but something most people don't.
If you are just beginning learning to code, pick out a tutorial, book, a lecture, anything you are comfortable learning with. But for the sake of yourself, try to finish it. I am not saying you need to go down the rabbit hole of trying to learn everything before you deem something as complete. Go through as much as you can, find interesting or as much as would help you build a simple end to end project. This lets you cover the fundamentals. Fundamentals are important and are used everywhere in one way or the other. Say you are learning web development and you learnt about the MVC architecture. This knowledge will be relevant in any MVC framework that you learn.

2. Build Projects

Getting hands on experience is the best thing that you can do to consolidate what you have learnt. This is my go to approach to when I suddenly need to work with a new language or a new framework or a new technology altogether. Creating a neat little project get's you going.
Some developers swear by building blogs or shopping apps to warm up.
Experience of building projects while learning is something akin to building muscle memory. Nothing else helps in your learning journey better than this.It makes you comfortable with the concepts while also allowing to help you create a codebase of the nice and nifty tools that you built along the way.
I have had tremendous help with this. For example: having the code for authentication handy is always useful when you are building a project that requires user login.

3. Read the Docs!!!

This one is important.
Reading the docs is a key skill and one of the most important habits of a good programmer. When you are good with the fundamentals, it save a tremendous amount of time in learning new concepts and good coding practices.

Here is something that will help you make a habit of this:
* If you are a learning to code via a tutorial, keep checking out the official documentation for the concepts that you just learned.
* Whenever you find a solution for a problem, lets say on stackoverflow or dev.to, look up the docs and read about the library functions, classes or modules to learn what it is actually capable of.
* If you don't understand the docs, maybe ask someone or look it up on a forum(again, stackoverflow, dev.to or anything that you fancy). When you get it, come back and bask in the glory of the doc.
* Reading what you specifically need for your project and solving it yourself is tremendously faster than watching an entire video lecture series before gathering up the courage to go try it out yourself.

4. Ask questions

Nobody knows everything about anything. So you're not alone, it's perfectly fine to ask. People are more than willing to explain and honestly, there is a treasure trove of programming questions on the internet that have already been asked(probably something that you exactly need). The noob syndrome should not hold you back.

5. Read other people's code

This one is a gold mine. There is a ton of code of code available for everyone to see, go read what you like.
* Reading other's people's code gives you insight on how people think. You can learn multiple approaches to the same problem see through other people's eyes.
* A programmer spends a lot of time reading code. In my case I probably read more code than I write.

Some other tips for the beginner:

Learn git (https://git-scm.com/docs/gittutorial)
Learn markdown (https://guides.github.com/features/mastering-markdown/)
Learn to write documentation (https://www.writethedocs.org/guide/writing/beginners-guide-to-docs/)
Teach (teach a friend, teach yourself on a piece of paper or write answers on stackoverflow etc)
Learn how to use a debugger

Happy Coding.