The only days I get things done are days when I have 0 meetings. If I have even 1 meeting it very likely I won’t do anything… most days have 4+ hours of meetings. On a no-meeting day, if I can get myself to at least start, I’ll end up getting a bunch of stuff done that was pending for a month (or 3). I keep telling people we need more heads down time for deep work, but get ignored. I don’t know about everyone else, but I can’t code anything when I’m being interrupted every 30 minutes for a meeting. Even if I know one is coming up in 2 hours, I know that will be the peak of my flow and don’t even want to start, knowing the flow will be broken, so I do nothing.

Other times the procrastination is really bad is when the job in front of me is too hard. Shifting my attention to anything else is my brains way of avoiding that overwhelming problem. For this I’d recommend breaking down the problem more. Break it down as small as you need until the piece in front of you is manageable. If it seems hard to start, because things are unclear, see if you can meet with some people to get clarity. I tend to put these meetings off too, because that’s uncomfortable, but once I have them (assuming the meeting went well and provided the clarify I needed), I feel a lot better and can start making progress again.

Yesterday was a rare no-meeting day for me. I started procrastinating, because that was the loop I was in. Then I cut my hair, which then meant I had to take a shower, by that time it was lunch, so no sense starting on anything before lunch… However, after lunch I forced myself to start, which is maybe a 5 minute thing, and once I did that I was golden. Heads down for a couple hours making progress. Then I ran into a problem that was uncomfortable, and got up and did some stuff around the house for a while, but then told myself I just needed to pick a direction, and if I think of something better later I can change it. By the end of the day I was able to ship some code that had been pending for 3 weeks.

If you can pay attention to what your triggers are, then you can come up with some strategies to better avoid then, or get back into things once you head down that road. When I was cleaning the house a little, it was somewhat intentional, as I figured if I distracted myself with something else I’d come up with an idea randomly or have a better chance of having a way forward when I sat back down. I like this better than beating my head against the desk. My brain can just do its thing for a while and then I can go back to work. It may not look productive, but it is.

When I used to work in an office I’d always wear a hoodie. When I got really focused on something my hood would go up. This was a completely unconscious thing, but people eventually learned not to bother me when my hood was up. That wasn’t a purposefully thing, but it worked out pretty well for me. Of course I also had a period of time where my boss made me sit in another room and told the entire rest of the team they weren’t allowed to talk to me. That helped a lot as well, as I was getting interrupted constantly… probably an unrealistic scenario for most.