Get your finger out!
Procrastination is awesome. I’m really good at it. However, I have a number of techniques to help me stave off never getting around to things, and one of them is GTD which I’ll talk about in another post.
However, as a really quick get-your-finger-out-brain-restart, the Pomodoro technique is a good one. Basically, you set a stop watch, timer or whatever and give yourself 20 minutes to finish something. The Pomodoro name comes from those red kitchen timers that look like pomodoros (ok, like a small red pepper to us brits).
Having a kitchen timer ticking away is a bit annoying to me, although the idea is good. Which is why I went and found an app for it (as usual) called, wait for it, POMODORO.
It sits in the top bar of your Mac and you can invoke it whenever you want. So when I have some horrible audio editing I really don’t want to do but really know I have to do it, I have the app already set at 25 minutes and I click on it and it counts down from 25 to zero, and I try and see how much editing (or anything other task) I can get going in the alloted time.
It makes it more fun, gets your brain in gear, and usually you’ve done the said task in way shorter than 25 minutes. And if you haven’t done it in time, you’re usually so far along that you want to keep going till it’s done.
If you can’t get an app, just get a kitchen timer and stick it on your desk. And when you get stuck, give yourself a 25 minutes challenge!
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