Procrastination–everybody has suffered it at some point in their life. It is described as the act of delaying or postponing something. 

During school life, students procrastinate on homework and assignments. During daily life, one may procrastinate on chores and errands.

Procrastination can also affect professionals, and they may start delaying their work until the last possible moment. For a working man, that is not a desirable state. After all, hurrying your work results in poor quality and affects your performance.

Today, we are going to check out how you can deal with procrastination with the help of accessible tools and technology.

How To Break Through Procrastination With Tech Solutions

Here are five solutions you can use to deal with procrastination in your work life.

Automate Repetitive Tasks

One of the common reasons for procrastinating is that people do not look forward to boring and repetitive tasks. No matter which industry you work in, there are some parts of your work that you have to do every day the same way. 

This unchanging routine breeds ennui and makes one lazy. This, in turn, leads to procrastination and delaying of tasks. 

To deal with this, people have to become smart and automate repetitive tasks. What this does is help you focus on the real work that needs your expertise and requires you to think.

For example, teachers who have to create digital records of their student’s progress and marks can use technology to automate that work. They can use scripts to feed the images or PDFs of student tests and assignments into an image to text converter and digitize them so they can be added to the records.

So, learning how to write simple scripts in languages like Python can help you automate simple tasks and help you focus on your real work. This automatically reduces a lot of the monotony in your daily work life, which is good for reducing procrastination.

Use Focus Mode on Your Devices 

Another reason why people procrastinate on work is that they get distracted. Nowadays, everyone has a smartphone with a ton of apps on them. 

They are always getting bombarded by notifications from social media apps and email apps and getting all kinds of promotional SMS messages. These are all really distracting.

Unfortunately, the fear of missing out (FOMO) and instant gratification are very strong motivators. So, people–especially younger employees–tend to use their phones during work and become distracted. This results in them procrastinating on their work.

These distractions also result in losing your train of thought. That’s because the human brain has limited short-term memory. Once that capacity is overloaded by distracting material, you will lose any work-related ideas you had cooking.

This results in more time wasted trying to remember that idea and results in involuntary delays.

To deal with this, use the built-in “Focus Mode” found on most smartphones. Focus mode makes your screen greyscale so that all attractive colors become muted. It also kills notifications from all apps so that your phone doesn’t vibrate and demand your attention. As such, you will be able to focus on your work more easily and avoid procrastinating.

Use Reminder Apps to Practice Pomodoro Technique

As humans, it is impossible to work with full focus for extended periods of time. Most people can only work on one thing for around 20 minutes. This is not a hard limit and varies from person to person.

After this amount of time passes, it becomes difficult to focus on the task at hand, and your thoughts start wandering. 

The Pomodoro technique utilizes this information to make people work more efficiently. Simply put, in the Pomodoro technique, you set a timer for around 25 minutes. During this time, you will only work on a specific task and nothing else. Once 25 minutes are over, you take a 5-10 minute break. Then you rinse and repeat. 

The point is to let your brain rest so that it can refocus on the task again.

There are apps that can help you implement the Pomodoro technique by giving you reminders to take a break or start working. Even your simple alarm and reminders app on your phone can do that with a bit of preamble.

Utilize Task Management Apps Wisely

Apps for sending timed reminders are one thing, but comprehensive task management software is a different beast altogether. 

Task management apps provide a lot of features that can help users manage their work tasks and deal with them in a timely manner. 

Procrastination can arise due to people thinking that a task is too monumental to tackle. When you put that task into a management app and think about it, you notice that it does not look so insurmountable anymore.

A good task management app lets you assign tasks to yourself on specific days or hours. You can also configure them to show only the tasks that can be tackled at once due to their prerequisites being met. The more basic tasks that you complete, the more advanced tasks become available. Otherwise, they remain hidden.

This approach helps you free your mind from needlessly worrying about a seemingly impossible task. Since you can focus on what can be done, you can do it easily without procrastinating. 

Such apps are great, but they do cost a pretty penny. So keep that in mind when deciding to use one.

Use Accountability Apps

Many people are just too used to having someone impress deadlines upon them. Throughout school, we have our teachers and our parents always telling us to do our homework and prepare for our tests. Many times, they even sit down and help us directly.

Unfortunately, some people get too used to that and can’t exercise the discipline required to be accountable to themselves. Fortunately, technology can help with that in the form of accountability apps.

An accountability app is similar to a task management app in that it allows you to assign tasks and deadlines to yourself. However, it is different because it visualizes your task progress and holds you accountable.

Accountability can be exercised in various ways. Common examples are given below.

• Your progress is shared with another person who holds you accountable.
• You pledge some money that you get back if all tasks are completed on time. Failure to complete tasks results in money being lost. 

You can use these apps to hold yourself accountable and avoid procrastinating. 

Conclusion

So, these are five ways in which technology can help you avoid procrastination in your work life. You can also apply these tactics to improve your daily life. 

Using such apps helps you practice the discipline required to be accountable to one’s self independently. So, it is a great approach to avoid procrastination.