We all have to stay home and social distance and it is all too easy to reach for the nearest form of entertainment to feel a connection with other humans around the world. It could be our phones and the thrill of social media, the tv or our personal computers.

The only problem is that this is a recipe for unproductivity and procrastination as for most of us whose work has to do with the creatives, work has not stopped, it majorly evolved and simply means we have to work differently.

Most creatives have to search for inspiration and ideas from the same social media we need to stay away from and our attention span reduces every time. The gloom and doom we get exposed to when we get on social media or any other media right now affect our creativity and gloomy means unmotivated. Unmotivated people, in turn, cannot create.

To cushion the effects of the things we see on the internet daily, we shift our minds to entertaining content and we get distracted more and more. Distraction equals no work or shabbily done work and a dissatisfied boss or line manager.

I recently realized that I previously had a problem with sitting still and staying on one task for hours and so I would switch from task to task mindlessly, staying busy with low priority tasks and then wonder why I didn’t get much work done. I needed a fix and so I went searching for solutions.

I started reading the book “The on time, on target Manager” and also got the deprocrastinator.co bundle expertly put together by the phenomenal Vita Benes. After going through most of these materials, I discovered that I had four areas to tackle:

• Distractions on my mobile phone
• Distractions on my laptop computer
• My routine and
• How I get my tasks done.

Distractions on my mobile phone:

I decided to track my phone usage for a week and I found out that I spent an average of 10hours on my phone daily. I was shocked! I could swear that I didn’t spend that much time on my phone but screen time doesn’t lie. I needed to solve this problem because 80% of that time was spent on social media and only about 10% spent on apps to boost my productivity and learning.

Since I had a focus problem, I decided to kill my mobile distractions. I deleted all my social media apps, excluding Instagram because I cant access all its features effectively on my desktop. Then I set the screen time limit for my WhatsApp and Instagram to 2hours and gave the passcode to my housemate to set up for me. I also deleted Netflix :).

I would have to grovel, beg and give detailed explanations about why I would need extra time on those apps if I ever needed them and so far, I have found a way to stay within my 2hour limit. At 10 pm, all my non-essential apps also get locked and I have to wait till 7 am to access them. What did that do to me? I became bored! But boredom is good according to Vita Benes and I would tell you why at the end of this article.

Distractions on my laptop:

I do 95% of my work on my laptop and truthfully, I was not getting much done. I got a couple of things to help me. First, I installed a few chrome extensions to help me;

• DeProcrastination — Helps me block out distractions by blocking certain sites and then I have a password restriction if I want to change my settings too.
• DF Tube — Helps me stay focused when I am on youtube, I do not get to see video suggestions.
• Ublock — Blocks popups everywhere!
• Newsfeed eradicator — Blocks my news feed when I have to be on Facebook for work.

To assist these plugins, I made a custom setting on my deprocrastination extension called creative mornings. It blocks out every site except the ones I put in as essential for work and as such I can focus till noon. All my social media also have time limits for visits and a restriction on the number of visits per day. I also make sure I stay under five tabs on my browser too, the deprocrastinator extension gives me popup notifications when I exceed 5 tabs.

This morning, for example, I wanted to watch one episode of the boss baby on Netflix while I was having breakfast and the extension didn’t allow me. If I had succeeded, you would most likely not be reading this beautiful article on how to fight procrastination in these times and stay productive.

Fixing up my routine:

I knew that I had to find a balance between work and my personal life if I was going to make it through these times sane and with everyone happy. I currently have a weekday routine that goes like this:

Wake up — 7 am

Morning routine(Cook, pray, exercise, shower) — 7 am -10 am

Work — 10 am — 1 pm

Nap — 1pm — 1:25pm

Lunch — 1:25pm — 1:45pm

Rest — 1:45 pm — 2 pm

Work — 2 pm to 6 pm

Dinner — 6 pm to 6:30 pm

Relax (Netflix, play, whatever) — 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm

Personal Development — 8:30 pm to 12 am

On the weekends, I follow the same routine except for work time, I play during work time :). But then, it’s all subjective, I might have personal projects to work on.

Revamping my todo lists.

The book “The on time, on target Manager”, opened my eyes to the fact that I had a problem with my priorities. I always had a beautiful to-do list and I always seemed to get about 65% of it done daily. The only problem is that 60 out of the 65% were low priority tasks!

I did a revamp of my todo list. Following the guidelines of Mr. Vita of Deprocrastinator.co in his book deprocrastination-everyday guide.

1. First, I did a goals list for April
2. Then I did another list for the things I had to do weekly to meet my monthly goals.
3. I had a list of generic low priority should-haves on my day to day to-do and
4. Finally, the most important list of them all: the two tasks list. This list had two high priority tasks that I had to get done before I got anything else done. After those two were done, I could keep updating the list from my weekly task list. This beautiful set up is done on google keep.

I found that I feel more fulfilled now and I can see my progress. It is beautiful when you can see your small efforts accumulate into big wins.

It is important to note these:

• I don’t follow the routine to the latter every day, sometimes I have slip-ups. These slipups reduced over time and I get more done now.
• It’s boring but boring is good because boring helps you focus enough to create. Remember how you doodle when you are bored in a meeting or class?
• Your problems might not be my problems. Diagnose yourself first, find out what distracts you most and then eliminate it. I do not watch tv but tv could be a problem for you.
• You don’t have to go all the way as I have done, I had to ease myself overtime before now into some of these restrictions and so you can start with one item first, get better and then add others.

I hope that this very detailed guide helps you get more productive as you apply them. If you enjoyed reading my article, do leave a clap so others can get to see it. Cheers!

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