Dear Work Therapist - How can I manage to concentrate faster?

Huwen Arnone [Deiser/Devoteam]

Hi!

Usually, when I face a challenging task, I have to pass through several minutes of procrastination before actually getting into the work (which I'm doing right now.)

I would love to learn from your experience and knowledge. To focus your answers, I would appreciate it if you go through the following questions:

• Does this happen to you?
• If it does, how do you tackle the task? Or do you just wait for your time to come after procrastination to get into work?
• Is there any technique or methodology to avoid this?

Thanks in advance for your responses and help. 🤩

Christine P. Dela Rosa

Dear @Huwen Arnone _Deiser_Devoteam_ ,

This is very relatable to me! Because I'm aware of how often this happens, I do a few things to reduce the amount of time procrastinating. See below.

• Replace procrastination with productivity - It's okay to not work on a task that (I think) I should be doing right now. The fact that you and I procrastinate for several minutes before diving in is an indicator that I'm not mentally ready to work on the task I'm avoiding. But instead of procrastinating, I do something else like tidy a shelf or clean up my email inbox.
• Break the task down - I find myself doing this particularly when I'm either a) not looking forward to doing the task or b) will take a long time OR requires deep thinking. Either way, there's an element of fear that something will be hard. So to combat that, I isolate what's hard and make it...not hard. Sometimes that means chunking out my time so that one task can be split into five little tasks. Sometimes that means I need to descope the task. Whatever it is, I try to ensure that I have the resources to take on something, and usually, that means shrinking down the scope of the task.
• Timebox - I learned that my personality tends to embrace scope creep (not great, I know). But I have a vision of what an end result should look like, and the ever-growing deliverables list ultimately paralyzes me. But with an iterative approach, I may not need to produce grandiose, perfect deliverables. Instead, it might be better to deliver a scaled-back version of a finished product so that I can get feedback on it. So instead of thinking about what needs to be accomplished with unlimited time, I ask myself, "what can I accomplish in 15 minutes, in 30, in an hour...?"

From a high-level perspective though, here are some questions you (and anyone else who experiences this) might want to ask themselves.

• How do you feel about the task at hand -- excited, afraid, bored, disinterested, intimidated, confused? 
• Why do you feel that way? Is the answer to this question something that is absolutely true...or just a maybe?
• What would make you not have those^ feelings? And what about the task can be removed or changed to reduce those feelings?
• Is there a pattern between when you procrastinate and the type of tasks that induce procrastination? Or if that's too hard, is there a pattern between the type of tasks that do not induce procrastination? 

I hope some of this helps, but if not, keep is posted on what's not working. Perhaps that can be directional on what else can be done.

Good luck!