If you were struggling, you couldn’t escape to the worlds of Facebook, YouTube and Netflix for instant relief.
How do I know?
Because I was born before 1985. I know what it feels like to be a student with and without the Internet.
While your video game was loading, you had time to think:
“Is this the best use of my time? Why am I avoiding this task? What am I scared of? Failure? Looking stupid? Am I just confused and overwhelmed?”
Pauses were built into the day to help you reflect on your behaviour (what you should and shouldn’t be doing).
But these days, with super fast Internet and mobile phones, pauses are nowhere to be seen. Most of us find ourselves in a constant state of restless idleness, switching rapidly from one task to the next.
As Michael Harris, author of The End of Absence, states:
“When teens work on their homework … a full two thirds of them are multitasking. If need be, they can simultaneously text, watch music videos, groom their Facebook page, and play Call of Duty, all while positioning up an essay on Hamlet.”
Struggling to write that Hamlet essay? No worries. You can toggle between Word and Facebook in less than a second. Boom! Instant rewards! Instant relief!
And this is how procrastination and multitasking become deeply ingrained (bad) habits.
Research shows that when you work this way …
By inserting a pause button into your life.
A pause button can help you to stop and reflect before you do something that you’ll later regret. It can help you re-focus and get back on track.
The pause button I’m talking about isn’t something you’ll be able to find on ebay or Amazon. You’ll need to create your own pause button.
The thing about your pause button is that it doesn’t need to be anything fancy. You could go on a free image site like Pixabay and print one out.
Or you could get creative and draw one on a sheet of paper. Decorate it with glitter, stickers, crayons, etc. Frame it if you want. You want to personalise it. Own it. This button (if you use it) is going to deliver you to greater productivity levels and focus.
Once you’ve got your pause button, stick it up on your wall. Make it far away enough so you need to take a few steps to get there.
Every time you feel the urge to procrastinate by switching to a more enjoyable task (e.g. Facebook), walk over to the pause button and hit it.
Now here’s the important part …
Your next small step may be:
• Have a drink of water
• Write one more sentence
• Set a timer and keep going for another five minutes
If you hit the pause button and think, “I really need a 5 minute break. I’m not getting anywhere with this …”, then no problem! Take a break. But be intentional about it and place a time limit on it (e.g. “I’m going for a 5 minute walk”).
Let me make it clear: taking breaks after doing some solid work is not procrastination. Never confuse relaxing with procrastination. You’re not a machine. You need to pace yourself. Breaks help you manage your energy levels so you can tackle your work with a refreshed, clear mind.
The act of getting up and walking over to your pause button will require a bit of willpower to start with. Initially, it may feel forced, strange and a little bit silly hitting a piece of paper on your wall. But persevere. The more times you hit that pause button, the sooner it will become a habit.
Once you kick the bad habit of multitasking and procrastination, you’ll find your brain will be less stressed. This in turn will make it easier for you to study and retain important information.
While everyone around you is freaking out because they’ve left their work until the last minute, you’ll be feeling calm and in control.
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For context, she was a sales manager who used a BlackBerry phone for work (a fancy, expensive device at the time).
Every minute of the interview, her phone pinged with a notification or she received an email alert on her laptop. She’d glance at one of her devices and, with a panicked look, say, “I need to answer this!”
It was an awkward and disjointed conversation, full of stops and starts. I have to admit, her behaviour annoyed me. I soon realised I wasn’t the only person feeling this way.
The sales manager mentioned that she had a 4-year-old daughter who would get upset with her.
She told me that her little girl would beg her to put her phone and computer away. She’d tug at her clothes and cry, “Mummy! Mummy! Put your phone away!”
I appreciated this woman’s honesty, especially when she said to me:
“On the weekend, I’m with my kids but not truly with them… if you know what I mean”.
I knew exactly what she meant.
That was over 10 years ago. Fast forward to today, and we’re all a bit like that sales manager. But things are a lot worse now.
Instead of being overwhelmed and distracted by phone calls and work emails, we’re dealing with powerful Big Tech companies that hijack our time, energy, and attention.
They’ve made us weak-willed and impulsive.
We’re now in a position where distraction is something we crave rather than put up with.
When we have a gap in our schedule or we have to wait in line, what do most of us do? We reach for our phones without even thinking.
Rather than be alone with our thoughts, we desperately try to fill the space with ‘phone snacks’.
When we feel confused, frustrated, or bored, we run to our devices to escape the discomfort and our brains reward us for doing so.
Every time we switch tasks, our brain releases a little shot of dopamine.
It’s these quick hits of dopamine that train us to crave checking our phones and, ultimately, multitasking.
In an environment of unrestricted tech use, my brain is like a wild monkey. It wants to run around, make a mess, and explore many different things all at once.
I can relate to Dr Nancy Colier when she writes in The Power of Off, the mind on technology is like a “wild, locked-up monkey that’s drunk two bottles of wine chased by a shot of Scotch and been stung by a whole swarm of bees”.
When I start multitasking (and it doesn’t take much to get me going), I feel amped up, frenzied, and agitated. My energy feels a little crazy.
Research shows that as we quickly switch from one task to another, we rapidly deplete our finite mental resources and put our brains under a lot of stress.
But it gets worse . . .
When we multitask, we also experience what researcher Sophie Leroy calls Attention Residue.
In a research paper called Why is it so hard to do my work? Leroy explains Attention Residue as the extent to which your attention is only partially focused on the current activity because a prior activity (the task you rapidly switched from) is still holding part of your attention.
Why does this matter?
Leroy’s research found that when you experience Attention Residue, your performance suffers.
It’s as if you’ve taken a big dollop of the previous task and put a thick slather of it all over the current task, thereby making a mess of the present moment.
The good news is we can stop messing with our precious moments by focusing on one task at a time.
In his excellent book Time Surfing, Zen Monk Paul Loomans encourages us to focus on one task at a time, with minimal interruptions, and do it until completion. He says if we do this, we will experience a sense of calm and pleasure in everything we do.
Even tasks we consider boring or mundane (e.g., peeling potatoes or cleaning your room) can be transformed into artistry when you are truly present.
Part of the problem is that we’re often in a rush to get to the next thing on our to-do lists. But as Loomans warns, “Rushing is like gulping down time. You’re not living for now but for later”.
To counter this frenetic urge to race ahead, Loomans suggests that we accept whatever we are doing as “the activity of the moment”. In other words, we view the task before us as the most important thing we can be doing in this moment and we forget the rest.
It’s a simple but powerful mental shift.
I’ve noticed that when I accept whatever I am doing as the thing I should be doing right now, I no longer feel the urge to work with such intense energy. I feel calmer. An added bonus is that when I slow down, I make fewer mistakes and tend to do a better job.
At the heart of it, doing one thing at a time means showing up to life and being present, to the good stuff but also the painful, boring bits.
If you find yourself reaching for your phone more than you’d like, ask yourself this question:
“Am I reaching for my phone to escape the present moment?”
For me, the answer is usually yes. I’m trying to avoid the discomfort of life. But life tends to be more meaningful and enjoyable when I stay fully present to what’s happening around me, with my phone out of sight.
Technology will dominate your life, and multitasking will be an issue unless you have strategies to protect your time, energy, and attention.
What motivates me to set limits on my tech use (specifically my phone) is a desire to feel calm, grounded, and focused. I also want to live a life of substance, not one in which I am constantly chasing instant gratification.
Here are the strategies that I am currently practising to help me decrease multitasking and cultivate calm:
When I’m with someone or working on an important task, I put my phone away and keep it out of sight. I want to be fully present with the person I’m with or the task at hand. Why?
Because attention is how we show others they matter.
When someone is checking their phone in a social situation, it communicates “I’m more interested in what’s happening on this screen than I am in you”.
When I think back to the interview with the sales manager, it would have been a better experience for everyone if she had put her phone on silent, left it in her bag, and closed her laptop.
There would have been fewer times saying “What was the question again?” and “Sorry, I can’t remember what we were talking about”.
We probably would have felt more connected, too.
Note: Even when my phone isn’t within arm’s reach, I can still catch myself rapidly switching between web browsers and tasks. However, I’ve noticed that my multitasking significantly increases when my phone is within arm’s reach.
You’ve probably heard of intermittent fasting, where you have a window for eating (e.g., 10am to 6pm). But have you heard of phone fasting?
Phone fasting is a period during the day when your phone is not within reach.
As TJ Power states in The Dose Effect:
“A phone fast enables your dopamine to replenish and creates the opportunity for connection and restoration.”
So, as an experiment, for 30 days, I phone fasted from 8pm until 12noon the next day (allowing myself to make urgent calls if needed). I discovered that this made a big difference to my ability to focus. I also experienced a sense of calm like never before.
At the start of the day, I create a ‘Wish List’ (another wonderful concept from Paul Looman’s Time Surfing book).
I write down all the things I’d like to do in the day, but there’s no pressure to do all of them. I then put the list away, and depending on how I feel, I listen to my intuition and trust myself to choose the right activity to begin with.
Before I start a work session, I also declare what I intend to do (e.g., “Chop vegetables for curry” or “Write for 45 minutes”). If possible, I also like to share what I plan to do with another human (I use an online coworking community called Cave Day to do this).
After every 25-30 minutes of work, I aim to take a short movement break (usually 2-5 minutes in duration). This helps me to stay energised and alert. But most importantly, it gives me a brain boost.
What I wish I had understood when I was younger is that you can’t focus for hours on end. It’s not humanly possible because your brain has a finite amount of attentional resources. This means as you focus on doing a task, your attentional resources get depleted (and if you multitask, you accelerate the depletion even more!).
However, research shows you can boost your attentional resources by taking short breaks or, as Paul Loomans likes to call them, ‘breathers’.
A ‘breather’ is any activity that allows you to get out of your head and grounded in your body.
Some of my favourite breather activities include going for a short walk, chopping vegetables, or riding my bike to pick up a package from the post office. These activities allow my brain and thoughts to roam free.
Although many of us default to checking our phones during breaks, resist the urge. The problem with using your phone on a break is that you’re still in your head. This means you’re churning through your attentional resources instead of replenishing them.
The sense of calm and pleasure I experience when I stop multitasking and focus on doing one thing at a time is second to none.
But in the age of the Attention Economy, with so many companies trying to hijack our attention, it takes discipline and practice to stay focused.
Without strategies in place to protect your focus, the default will be multitasking and its friends – chaos, stress, and fatigue.
We may not have a 4-year-old child tugging on our clothes when we’re using our phones. But perhaps we should all listen to the wisdom of that little girl and put our phones away.
On these days, the temptation to procrastinate and distract oneself can be strong.
I recently spent a few days with my family in the countryside, where I enjoyed reading by a crackling fire. But when I found myself back home in my office, I struggled to get back into the swing of things.
I was experiencing a full-blown holiday comedown.
For some context, I had printed out the slides for an upcoming presentation that I needed to practise, but I felt resistance every time I looked at the slides.
My mind screamed, “Nooo! I don’t want to practise!”. Without even thinking, I kept pushing the slides away like a toddler smooshing their vegetables around on their plate.
But at some point, I caught myself in the act. Without berating myself, I managed to turn things around and ease into my practice.
In this blog, I’ll share a couple of simple strategies I use to get a better handle on my procrastination and overcome resistance.
According to Procrastination scholar Tim Pychyl, procrastination isn’t a time management issue. It’s an emotion management issue. If you can get a better handle on your emotions, you’ll have a better handle on procrastination.
Let’s unpack this…
Often, when we procrastinate, it’s because we’re trying to avoid experiencing negative emotions. The task we need to do brings up feelings of discomfort (e.g., boredom, fear, guilt, anxiety, and stress), so we avoid the task to make ourselves feel better.
But avoidance makes no sense when you think about it.
Oliver Burkeman explains the problems associated with avoidance in his book Meditations for Mortals. He writes:
“The more you organise your life around not addressing the things that make you anxious, the more likely they are to develop into serious problems – and even if they don’t, the longer you fail to confront them, the more unhappy time you spend being scared of what might be lurking in the places you don’t want to go. It’s ironic that this is known, in self-help circles, as ‘remaining in your comfort zone’, because there’s nothing comfortable about it. In fact, it entails accepting a constant background tug of discomfort – an undertow of worry that can sometimes feel useful or virtuous, though it isn’t – as the price you pay to avoid a more acute spike of anxiety.”
Dutch Zen Monk Paul Loomans labels the tasks we avoid as ‘gnawing rats’. He says these tasks “eat away at you under the surface”.
Have you noticed that whenever you try to avoid a task, it’s usually still on your mind, using up your precious mental resources?
That’s what Loomans means by the task eating away at you under the surface.
Why does he use the peculiar term ‘gnawing rat’? Looman’s daughter used to have pet rats that would eat loudly under his bed, keeping him awake at night.
Loomans explains that if you can befriend your gnawing rats, you can transform them into white sheep. Just like a white sheep follows you around passively, once you transform a task into a white sheep, it’s a lot easier to make a start.
The question is, how do you transform a ‘gnawing rat’ (a task you are avoiding) into a white sheep?
The key is to approach procrastination from a place of curiosity.
Loomans suggests creating a positive, open relationship with the task you’ve been avoiding. You need to sit with it or visualise the task. Instead of giving yourself a hard time, get curious about why you have such a strained relationship with this task.
Loomans advises:
“… you’re not being asked to immediately do whatever it is that’s gnawing at you. The assignment is only to establish a relationship with it. You let all the various facets sink in and then let them go again.
The rat no longer gnaws at you, and it has settled down. It’s no longer trying to get your attention, but follows quietly behind. It now has white legs and curly fleece – it’s turned into a white sheep.”
I decided to follow Looman’s advice with this presentation I had been avoiding. To begin with, I pulled out my slides and I just sat with them.
I closed my eyes, tuned into my body and asked myself:
“Why am I feeling resistance towards practising this presentation? What’s going on?”
Within 30 seconds, the answer came to me. The resistance came from how I thought I’d feel after doing my speech practice: exhausted and emotionally depleted.
You see, when I practice a presentation, I typically go into turbocharge mode. It’s like I’m delivering the real thing: I gesticulate, project my voice, pace around the room, and rely on my memory and the pictures on my slides to remember the content (I don’t refer to my notes).
All of this takes a lot of mental and physical effort.
So, naturally, when I looked at my slides for this one-hour presentation, I felt flat and heavy.
I equated one hour of presentation practice with having a fried brain by the end.
But then I had a brilliant idea. I thought, “What if this practice session didn’t have to feel like a hard slog? What if it could be fun, light and easy but still effective? What would that look like?”
It immediately occurred to me that I had to shorten my practice session, which brings me to the next strategy . . .
To keep my practice session fun, light and easy, I settled on doing just five minutes of speech practice.
Instead of pacing around my office and practising in turbocharge mode for an hour, I sat myself down with a hot chocolate. I set a timer for five minutes, pulled out a mini whiteboard and started recalling the content (scribbling out and drawing pictures of what I needed to say).
When the timer went off, I checked my notes to see how I went (What did I remember? What did I forget to say?).
Then, I checked in with myself – “How am I feeling after that mini practice session?”. Instead of feeling depleted, I was feeling good! I felt less overwhelmed by this presentation. The resistance had subsided. As Paul Loomans would say, the presentation had transformed from a gnawing rat into a white sheep!
I felt excited, even a little inspired.
I could have easily kept practising for another 10-20 minutes, but I decided to give myself a break to re-energise (I got up and walked on the treadmill for 2 minutes).
This gave me insight into the need to vary the intensity and mode of each study session, depending on my energy levels and what I have planned for the rest of the day. Sometimes it’s good to go into turbocharge mode, but not always.
Not every study/work session has to be hardcore. Work sessions that leave you feeling completely drained by the end can be counterproductive. As Professor BJ Fogg says, “Tiny is mighty”.
Firstly, tiny study sessions are less scary for your brain. Five minutes of speech practice and flashcard practice feels easy. You think, “I can do 5 minutes!”.
In contrast, one hour of study feels scary for your brain, which means you’re more likely to procrastinate.
When you go tiny, it’s also easier to give your full focus to the task at hand. Here’s the thing about focus: focusing your mind takes a lot of your brainpower. And you have a limited supply of brainpower!
As you sit there and study, your brainpower gets depleted. But research shows one way to boost your attentional resources (i.e. your brainpower) is by taking regular breaks. If you study in short focused bursts and then take a break, you can stay refreshed and ensure your study sessions are effective.
But most importantly, tiny study sessions help to create momentum, and they leave you feeling good!
I tend to push myself to the point of exhaustion when I practise my talks. But I can see now that this makes it hard for me to want to practise in the future.
By dedicating just 5–10 minutes to the task and enjoying it, I’m more likely to do another 5 minutes (or more) of practice tomorrow. Doing five minutes of practice every day is infinitely better than doing no practice or cramming a long practice session in the day before.
You’re not going to go from good to great in one tiny study session. But you can make meaningful progress and create the momentum you need to keep going.
So, don’t turn your nose up at five minutes of flashcard practice or 10 minutes of doing a practice test. If done with focus and intention, that’s a solid study session that can set you on the path to success.
Image credit:
Toddler (featured in image 2): “Skeptical” by quinn.anya is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Rat: “Fancy rat blaze” by AlexK100 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
I didn’t know how to relax. I had one speed and one speed only . . . GO!
When I started dating my husband, he made a comment I never forgot. He said, “You’re intense.”
I laughed it off, thinking, “How ridiculous!”. But looking back, he was right.
Over the last few years, I’ve learnt to live life at multiple speeds and different intensities.
I’ve also learnt how to manage my energy better and pace myself. One thing the pandemic taught me was the importance of slowing down and taking regenerative breaks.
For many years, even though I intellectually understood the importance of rest, I struggled to do it.
For some reason, I thought I had to be always working.
My to-do list was something I had to power through. One thing after another. Got that thing done? Quick! Cross it off the list! Onto the next task.
As a student, I developed a bad habit of staying back late at university. As an undergrad, I’d hang out with my psychology friends in the computer labs until nearly midnight (I had to call the university security service to escort me to my car!).
Then, as a PhD student, I’d be in my office working late when everyone else had gone home. I’d buy takeaway that I’d eat alone at my desk. I’d get home late. I’d get to bed late.
How did I feel the next day?
Not great.
The problem with this approach is now glaringly obvious to me: because I was getting less sleep, I started to feel run down, which made it hard for me to focus, do my best thinking, and work efficiently.
Going fast all the time was actually slowing me down.
Then, I met a Brazilian PhD student called Carlos.
Carlos showed me there was a different way to work. A better way. A more sustainable way.
When I first met Carlos, I was taken aback by his beaming smile and infectious laugh.
He seemed genuinely happy, which wasn’t the case for many PhD students.
It wasn’t uncommon to see PhD students glued to their seats for hours with a 2-litre bottle of Coke on their desks. But this was not Carlos’s style.
I learnt that Carlos rode his bike to university every day (partly to save money and partly to clear his mind). He’d take breaks to play soccer and go rock climbing.
With all this activity, you might be wondering whether Carlos was managing to get any work done on his PhD.
He certainly was.
Carlos was super productive as a PhD student.
He was publishing papers and on track to finish his PhD on time, all with a big smile.
Here’s the really interesting thing about Carlos . . .
When he started working on his PhD, he was like me: pushing himself to work long, ridiculous hours.
As an International student, Carlos had a strict deadline for submitting his PhD thesis. At the beginning of his PhD, he told me he was driven by fear that he might not finish the work in time, so working nonstop seemed like the only path forward.
But then Carlos had an epiphany.
He realised he was just as productive when he allowed himself to engage in fun activities (e.g., rock climbing and playing soccer) as when he insisted on pushing himself to work crazy hours without taking any breaks.
This made Carlos realise that he needed to get serious about these fun rest breaks and prioritise them.
Whether Carlos realised it or not, he was emulating the behaviour of top research scientists.
In one longitudinal study, 40 scientists in their 40s were followed for 30 years. These scientists had attended top universities and showed promise in their careers.
The researchers wanted to know the difference between the people who had become top scientists and those who became mediocre scientists.
In other words, what were the top scientists doing that the mediocre scientists weren’t doing?
One of the key differences that stood out was movement.
The top scientists moved a lot more than the mediocre scientists. They engaged in activities such as skiing, hiking, swimming, surfing and playing tennis.
In contrast, the mediocre scientists did a lot less physical activity.
They were more likely to say, “I’m too busy to go hiking this weekend. There’s work I need to catch up on.” They saw physical movement as eating into the time they could be working.
The top scientists thought differently about movement. Moving their bodies was critical to doing good scientific work. It was something they needed to prioritise in their lives.
When I first read about this study, I immediately thought about Carlos. Riding his bike, playing soccer, and rock climbing were all activities that helped him work effectively on his PhD. These weren’t time-wasting activities; they were necessities.
Movement gets you out of your head and grounds you in your body. It also gives you space away from your work, which our minds need when doing complex and challenging tasks.
In addition, as you move your body, your brain is bathed in feel-good chemicals. It’s easier to get things done when you feel good and less stressed. You can have more fun. You come back into balance.
But do all breaks need to involve movement?
Not always. But you should try to find fun activities that you can do away from your desk, phone, or computer.
Do something that lets your mind loose and requires little to no mental effort to execute.
Here are some of my favourite fun break activities:
These fun break activities may not seem like much fun to you. I understand if steaming your clothes sounds boring (I’m even surprised by how much fun this is).
Your job is to discover your own fun break activities. But how do you do this? It’s simple – you follow the Rules of Fun.
Psychologist Risa Williams lays out the Rules of Fun in her brilliant book The Ultimate Anxiety Toolkit.
The Rules of Fun are as follows:
What was fun for you yesterday may not be fun today. That’s okay. Focus on what you find fun today. Only you know what that is.
The activity isn’t something you should find fun. It’s actually fun for you (it brings a smile to your face and a sense of calm).
For example, many Australians love watching the footy, but I don’t enjoy it. I’d much rather head outside, run around, kick a footy, or throw a frisbee. This is fun for me!
Risa Williams also points out that your list of fun activities will need to be updated regularly. She explains that we are constantly changing and evolving, so naturally, what we find fun will change and evolve, too.
Stay flexible and trust your intuition when it comes to the activities you find fun.
Start to listen to your body. Begin to notice what activities leave you feeling good.
The break activity shouldn’t leave you feeling mentally fried or emotionally wrecked. If it does, you’ve violated this rule.
For example, I never feel good when binge-watching a Netflix series or sitting for long periods. In contrast, I nearly always feel good after a walk.
As I mentioned, you need to get out of your head and get grounded in your body.
If you’re stuck in an anxiety loop about a comment or post a friend made on social media, the last thing you want to do is go online. You need to calm down by engaging in a fun activity (away from screens) that brings you back into balance.
You don’t need to fly to Bali or have an expensive massage to take a fun break. You can engage in many free and cheap activities at home and on your own.
Going for a walk around the block is free and easy. Drawing some silly faces on a scrap of paper is free and fun.
In contrast, travelling to the gym to take a cardio class (and getting there on time) feels much harder.
Let’s face it: if the break activity feels difficult or requires a lot of mental or physical effort, time, or money, you’re probably not going to do it.
However, when your fun break activities are easy, you’re more likely to do them again and again.
Little kids know how to have fun. They will happily and instinctively pick up some crayons to draw. They’ll nap without guilt. But as we grow older, many of us lose our sense of fun and our ability to rest. We start to take ourselves too seriously.
But no matter your age, it’s time to get serious about taking fun breaks.
I’ve discovered that the key to feeling satisfied and content is to feel calm and grounded. But you can’t feel calm and grounded if you constantly push yourself to do more and more.
To keep your body and mind in balance, you need to insert fun breaks into your day. These fun breaks are not a waste of time. They are essential for feeling good, fully alive, and doing your best work.
So, in the spirit of fun, what will you do to give yourself a fun break? Follow the rules of fun and experiment with different activities. Be playful!
Finally, do you know what happened to Carlos? He’s gone on to become a respected Senior Lecturer at a top university in Australia . . . and he still enjoys going rock climbing.
