A Deep Work Protocol: Methods to Practically Kill In-The-Moment Procrastination

I have a lot of problems with writing.

I’m certainly not the first writer with such issues; writing is a nexus of all my insecurities, and it results in horrendous issues with focus, lack of planning, procrastination, and perfectionism. 

These are what I think of as interstitial issues. Up until now I’ve been attacking the bones and body of self help - things like habits and how to form them and how to conserve willpower drains.

But in putting a system of productivity together in real life, it’s the small things that get overlooked. What you actually do or don’t do in the minutes and seconds before and during work can seriously destroy output.

I’ve been scrabbling around all this for a long time. I’ve attempted and failed to use planners since middle school, and I always look with awe at Lydia, who is maniacally good at this (She has a specific type of planner that’s color coded, plans in advance for her deadlines, and everything seems to work like clockwork). And that’s understandable - she has to be on the ball with her work. For lost freelancers ambling around in the void it’s a totally different story.

I’ve just read Cal Newport’s book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, and I feel that he offers immensely detailed and practical advice in this arena. It's fast becoming one of my favorite self help books. He talks about:

-The power of rituals
-Confronting the distracting nature of the internet
-Keeping metrics
-Creating a daily plan

This last point especially stands out as Newport suggests such an extreme form of it. He advocates to start the work day with a to-the-minute schedule of what you will do and to revise it as soon as possible as circumstances change. 

He admits that this sound excessive, and I agreed until it dawned on me that this is an implementation intention. And everything else sort’ve clicked.

He continues to address common objections: What if something changes? What if the task time you’ve allotted takes more time? What’s the point when you know what you have to do already?

For Newport, the excessively nitpickckiness in taking time to immediately revise the schedule is well worth it because it activates adherence. I wasn’t convinced until I remembered that the best writing stints I’ve had was during the last NaNoWriMo, where I logged every break and metric of word count with Pomodoros to streamline the process and see if there were any patterns. But looking back, it also kept me on track.

The second revelation was that this is purely mechanical.

What I mean by that is that I know that all these little protocols work on long term habits. Do Tiny Habits and you’ll get to habituation faster.  Do implementation intention and mental contrasting and it’s more assured. Make a habit of recording your habits and you’ll pick them up again after a break. 

If you do X, then Y will happen, no “digging deep” required.

I just never thought of daily work distraction and procrastination as solvable by that means, but for the last week the protocol I created based on Newports ideas has trumped even my horrendously distractible mind.

My Deep Work Protocol:

1. I spent a few minutes writing down exactly how I intend my work day to  go on a piece of paper. This is to-the-minute, including breaks. If it changes I take the time to immediately revise it.

2. I put my phone on airplane mode.

3. I use Self Control to block Reddit and Facebook, as these are my go-to mindless automaton methods of wasting time and procrastinating.

4. I get on Spotify and play the “Deep Focus” radio station, which I find blandly ambient enough to block sounds without distracting me.

5. I set my Pomodoro at the appointed time. I do 13 minutes for really hard tasks, 20 minutes for easier ones.

While none of these steps is particularly mind blowing (except the plan-as-implementation-intention) there is a lot of behavioral science at work:

-Steps 1 - 4 are a ritual. 

-Pomodoros are like Tiny Habits. If I’m doing something painful, I don’t want long exposure to pain to prevent me from doing the task. In my NaNoWriMo wins I found that smaller bursts actually had me doing more across time. This may change as my focus builds.

-The plan is an implementation intention.

-The whole process already troubleshoots - I can’t be reached by phone, I can’t get to my number 1 and 2 procrastination outlets. It acts like the practical steps after a mental contrasting plan.

-The music soothes and relaxes me, while ridding me of external auditory distractions.

I have tested this out for the last week, and the boost in productivity has been startling. While habits got me to do my work, it was only after a lot of procrastination. These failures to start often ended up messing up my other habits further along in the chain. My focus was constantly being pulled by either random messages or sparkly new videos on the internet.  These are all gone. 

While before I felt like a train violently going off the rails, I now feel the only option I have is to chug straight ahead. And that’s a fantastic place to be.

Photo cred: Old No. 70 by Michael B.

12 Methods to Combat Procrastination in Habits

I’ve just wok up and completed all tasks except writing. And I just can’t do it. All the procrastination mechanisms in my head kick into high gear. I’m checking email, Facebook, and Reddit incessantly.

This is understandable - writing for me is tied up with all sorts of emotions and fears, and it’s a task with many vague parts. This all reminds me of an article (now a book!) philosophy professor John Perry wrote long ago on procrastination. Procrastinators, to him, are rarely lazy. Rather, they have problems actually doing the task at the top of their list. His initial technique from the original article (I’m still reading his book) is incredibly unsatisfying: fool yourself into thinking that the top of the list is on the bottom. This allegedly works because procrastinators also have high self delusion skills. He then advocates a Lazy Susan approach - rotating tasks to satisfy that need for distraction.

This strategy doesn’t work for me. The task at hand is like touching a hot plate – it’s filled with an initial fear of pain and nothing is going to delude me out of knowing that the primary task is sitting there like a lump of hot lead.

Observing myself, I’ve come to some conclusions. I get tense. It’s an almost unconscious avoidance. It definitely has to do with the magnitude of the task, and it accumulates with tasks further on down the line that I’m not even working on at the moment, making what's directly in front of me feel like an unliftable weight.

With that in mind here are some strategies I’ve come up with:

1) A smooth NLP-like transition that robs you of agency. The ideal is the oft-repeated intro line to most of the yoga classes I took back in 2005.

“As you bring your attention to your breath it will naturally lengthen and smooth out.”

NLP is a weird field, but one aspect I like about it is that it can function like an irrigation ditch for the pond of the mind. If I ask you to notice the tingling sensation at the back of your neck, it really doesn’t matter if there is such a sensation there or not; you’ve probably already brought your attention to your neck.

2) Relaxation. The rising sensation of panic followed immediately by tension and avoidance encompasses the emotional range of failing to start a task. In the face of relaxation tension cannot exist. So, perhaps a relaxation routine can help the starting of practice. This could be something as simple as starting my music playlist.

3) Pomodoros. I used this to great affect this NaNoWriMo, spurring myself to action in spurts. I used a smaller 20 minute increments rather than the standard 25 minutes.

It’s exactly like a TinyHabit, but for an one instance of a practice session.

4) Drop Sets. Drop sets in bodybuilding is a technique of continuing an exercise at a lower weight after muscle failure at a higher weight. I think that if I can’t immediately start a session, there’s nothing going to happen except more dithering. I recently worked through dithering this week by just dropping 30 minute sets to 20 minute. I managed to actually do more work than I usually do despite an immense upwelling of procrastination at the beginning of the session.

5) The 3 second or 5 second rule, which I’ve talked about before. This works hand-in-hand with the previous point and the next one.

6) Jumping into the process with a timer. This has naturally been the best method for other tasks like meditation. If I don’t just start my timer, I just start dithering, but if I start it I’m pulled along almost despite myself. The 3 or 5 second rule helps out with this as well, preventing paralysis by analysis. This works hand-in-hand with:

7) Proper micro formation of a habit. Implementation intention shouldn't just be

when [I take a shower] then [I meditate]  

Rather, it is more efficient (and prevents procrastination) if it’s:

when [I put on my clothes after stepping out of the shower] then [I start my meditation clock and sit down]

6) Ritual. I’ve theorized before that a ritual can help ease the beginning of an action, like overcoming inertia in physics. Athletes seem to use it to great affect, and it functions as a kinesthetic form of anchoring.

7) Smaller transitions in advancement. Jumping from 5 minutes on a rower to 1 hour just doesn’t work. 5 minutes acts because it’s a small change - it’s easier to just do it. Jumping from that to an hour makes it so that there’s a huge wall in your mind. But at the same time you’ve developed a habit of doing that action. And there’s the real problem. On one hand you have to do the task because your habit is solid. On the other hand you cannot accomplish the daily minimum. You’re stuck, and because you’re stuck you can’t skip the task and go on to the next task.

8) Avoiding lags. The one thing I notice is that once I’m working, if there’s a lag, the same painful procrastinatory host of sensations comes up. It’s talked a lot in the discussion of flow states, the conditions of which are incredibly informative when it comes to forming a practice session.

9) Shuffling tasks. The Lazy Susan approach could potentially work to prevent lags. A long time ago when I started shuffling reading multiple books in a session I found I actually read more. I never just have one writing/work task to do - I have a bunch, so it might work to have a list to shuffle through if I ever hit a lag.

10) Artificial Starts.Holly Lisle advocates just writing a nonsense throwaway sentence to get started, which could be incorporated into a ritual.

11) An incredibly clear protocol. In writing I’m now very good at spitting out first drafts. In editing, I get bogged down, and this creates lag, which then creates procrastination and no forward momentum. I’ve discussed about a possible protocol for rewrites courtesy of James Patterson’s Master Class.

12) Block distractors like facebook, reddit, or gmail. I’m hesitant to use such surface level fixes because I don’t believe that they actually address the deeper problems. But it could be something to try.

photocred: tapping pencil by Rennett Stowe, stencil by Kat…, weights by jerryonlife, stop watch by Big Swede Guy, pawn by Rey-Ann Panaligan,