I’ve noticed that procrastination and inability to be consistently productive at work has become quite common in recent years. This is clearly visible in younger people who have grown up with an endless stream of entertainment literally at their fingertips, on their mobile phone. It is however a trap one can escape from with a little bit of help.

Procrastination is natural — they say humans are lazy by nature after all. Probably all of us have had moments when we choose to postpone a task we know we should be working on, and instead spent our time doing secondary tasks (valorisation). Classic example is cleaning your apartment when you should be preparing for an exam. Some may procrastinate by not doing any work at all, and just watching YouTube videos or the like. To some people, typically those who are in their 20s and early in their career, procrastination can be a big challenge and finding the discipline to stick to planned work may need intentional extra effort, and perhaps even external help.

During my 20+ year career in software development I’ve been blessed to work with engineers of various backgrounds and each with their unique set of strengths. I have also helped many grow in various areas and overcome challenges, such as lack of intrinsic motivation and managing procrastination, and some might be able to get it in check with some simple advice.

Distance yourself from the digital distractions

The key to avoiding distractions and procrastination is to make it inconvenient enough that you rarely do it. If continuing to do work is easier than switching to procrastination, work is more likely to continue.

Tips to minimize digital distractions, listed in order of importance:

1. Put your phone away. Just like when you go to a movie and turn off your phone for two hours, you can put the phone away completely when starting to work. Put the phone in a different room to ensure there is enough physical distance between you and the distraction, so it is impossible for you to just take a “quick peek”.
2. Turn off notifications from apps. Don’t let the apps call you like sirens luring Odysseus. You don’t need to have all the notifications. You will see what the apps have when you eventually open them at a time you choose to use them.
3. Remove or disable social media apps, games and the like from your phone and your computer. You can install them back when you have vacation. You can probably live without them for some time. If you can’t remove them, explore your phone’s screen time restriction features to limit your own access to apps that most often waste your time. These features are sometimes listed in the phone settings under “digital health”.
4. Have a separate work computer and work phone. Having dedicated ones just for work that are void of all unnecessary temptations helps keep distance from the devices that could derail your focus.
5. Listen to music. If you feel your brain needs a dose of dopamine to get you going, listening to music helps satisfy your brain’s cravings while still being able to simultaneously keep working.

Doing a full digital detox is probably not practical, or not sustainable for an extended time. One needs apps to stay in touch with friends and family, and staying current in software development probably requires spending some time reading news online and such. However the tips above can help contain the distractions and minimize the spontaneous attention the distractions get.

Some of the distractions may ironically be from the work itself, for example Slack notifications or new email notifications. I recommend turning them off for a couple of hours every day to have some distraction free time. It should be enough to check work mail a couple times a day. Checking them every hour probably does not add much overall value for the company unless your work is in sales or support where the main task itself is responding to emails.

Distraction free work environment

Following the same principle of distancing yourself from distractions, try to use a dedicated physical space for working. If you don’t have a spare room to dedicate to work, use a neighborhood café or sign up for a local co-working space or start commuting to the company office to find a space to be focused on work in.

Break down tasks into smaller steps

Sometimes people postpone tasks because they feel intimidated by the size or complexity of a task. In particular in software engineering problems may be vague and appear large until one reaches the breakthrough that brings the vision of how to tackle it. Breaking down problems into smaller more manageable pieces has many advantages in software engineering. Not only can it help with task-avoidance, but it can also make the problem easier to analyze, suggest solutions and test them and build a solid foundation to expand upon to ultimately later reach a full solution on the entire larger problem.

Working on big problems as a chain of smaller tasks may also offer more opportunities to celebrate success on completing each subtask and help getting in a suitable cadence of solving a single thing, taking a break and then tackling the next issue.

Breaking down a task into concrete steps may also help with getting more realistic time estimations. Sometimes procrastination isn’t real — someone could just be overly ambitious and feel bad about themselves for not doing an unrealistic amount of work.

Intrinsic motivation

Of course, you should follow your passion when possible. Strive to pick a career that you enjoy, and thus maximize the intrinsic motivation you experience. However, even a dream job is still a job. Nobody is ever paid to do whatever they want. Any work will include at least some tasks that feel like a chore or otherwise like something you would not do unless paid to.

Some would say that the definition of work itself is having to do things one would otherwise not do. You can only fully do whatever you want while on vacation or when you choose to not have a job at all. But if you have a job, you simply need to find the intrinsic motivation to do it.

Simply put, some tasks are just unpleasant or boring. Our natural inclination is to avoid them in favor of more enjoyable activities. For these situations we just have to find the discipline to force ourselves to do the tasks and figuratively speaking whip ourselves into being motivated to complete the tasks.

Extrinsic motivation

As the name implies, this is something people external to you need to provide, such as your employer or manager. If you have challenges in managing yourself and delivering results on a regular basis, somebody else needs to set goals and deadlines and keep you accountable for them. At the end of the day this means that eventually you will stop receiving salary or other payments unless you did your job.

Forcing people to do something isn’t nice, but eventually it needs to be done. It would not be fair for an employer to pay those who did their work the same salary as those who procrastinated and fell short on their tasks.

If you work solo, you can also simulate the extrinsic motivation by publicly announcing milestones and deadlines to build up pressure for yourself to meet them and avoid publicly humiliation. It is a well-studied and scientifically proven phenomenon that most university students procrastinate at the start of assignments, and truly start working on them only once the deadline is imminent.

External help for addictions

If procrastination is mainly due to a single distraction that is always on your mind, it may be a sign of an addiction. For example, constantly thinking about a computer game or staying up late playing a computer game, to the extent that it seriously affects your ability to work, may be a symptom of an addiction, and getting out of it may be easier with external help.

Discipline and structure

Most of the time procrastination is not due to an addiction, but simply due to lack of self-discipline and structure. The good thing is that those things can be learned. It is mostly a matter of getting into new habits, which most young software engineers pick up more or less automatically while working along the more senior ones.

Hopefully these tips can help you stay on track and ensure you do everything you are expected to do with clear focus, and on time!