NOVEMBER 2020

Anti-Procrastination
Tools and Techniques
DAILY SMALL WINS
Small Steps Big Changes

FREE REPORT!
PREPARED BY
RAMIL B.
WWW.DAILYSMALLWINS.COM
 DAILY SMALL WINS

You look at your watch, it’s 4:47 pm and you

Introduction have not completed yet your project that is
due by 5:00 pm. You constantly browsing on
social media, chatting with you officemate
seated right next to you while working on the
project. You procrastinate now and then
without realizing that you are running out of
time!

Sounds familiar right? Most of us have been

into this same kind of situation before. Do not
fret, you are certainly not alone. 20 percent of
the adult population put off tasks by
exchanging for more pleasurable things and
allowing themselves to be distracted. Doing
more pleasurable things in place of less
pleasurable ones is the direct definition of
procrastination. The important task is
"Your life is
normally put off to a later time.
happening right
now. Don't let The cause of procrastination differs from
procrastination person to person and not always obvious and
take over your life. there are also different triggers for us to
Be brave and take procrastinate. Whatever the main reason is,
procrastination has a far deeper and
risks. You life is
damaging impact on our career and personal
happening right life. It can hold us back in reaching our most
now." potential and succeeding in the most
important aspect of your life..your career.
Roy T. Bennett
This short article provides a few key tools and
techniques to overcome procrastination in
your workplace.
So read on!

PAGE 02
 DAILY SMALL WINS

1
Plan Your Day

"If you fail to plan, you're planning to fail.".

Planning is essential if you want to beat procrastination. You need to plan

carefully your day. Having a daily, weekly and even monthly plan will help
you in the long run.

Planning is one of the most used words in the English language, however,
many people dread and avoid this since they are equating planning as
working hard, boring, and will disrupt their comfort zone. Planning can be
tedious and frustrating. But it's an effective way to improve your
productivity.

Let me show you a quick example of weekly and daily planning for your
work which is very effective and is used by successful people.

PAGE 03
 DAILY SMALL WINS

Weekly Plan

1. Prepare your weekly plan the night before you

go to work. I usually create my plans for the coming
week on Sunday evening.

2. Have a To-Do List or I commonly call Weekly

Action Plan to list down all your coming activities for
the week.You need to be specific as possible in your
planning. Indicate the priority, duration, and
specific day when to do your plan to perform the
task. I will explain that further in the next sections.
Put a priority mark on each task to indicate your
ILLUSTRATION 1:
ABOVE IS A TYPICAL EXAMPLE OF A WEEKLY PLAN. topmost priority and what task you should be
TASK ARE LISTED IN A DAILY BASIS WITH
CORRESPONDING PRIORI AND DURATION focusing on before you start your week. You can
mark them as High Priority (H), Medium Priority.
(M), and Low Priority (L).

Next, you need to estimate how long each task takes

to complete. This is one of the tricky phases of
planning and you need to be accurate as much as
possible on the duration of each task. Too short a
task duration you provided will impact your whole
plan for the week, while too long a task duration you
estimated will result in your other task not
accomplishing. I normally use some useful
applications like Toggl from Appstore and Android
to record each activity I am doing with actual time
and duration. This will help you to have a more
accurate estimation of your task for your planning.
Try to practice this for 30 days.

PAGE 04
 DAILY SMALL WINS

Weekly Plan

Then, after you put the duration of each task

completion, you need to add up the total hours you
need for each day. We need this time allocation in
the later phase of this article when we discuss
timeboxing.

3. After completing all the details, make sure to save

your plan for the week. In our modern time where
technology is right at the tip of our fingertips, you
can use your phone or tablet to create your weekly
plan.

I normally use Notes from my iPhone and iPad to

draft my weekly plan. You can also use any other
application which you are comfortable with like
Evernote, Reminders, and others.

You can refer to illustration 1 above for example of a

weekly plan based on the instructions given. You
can use Notes from your phone or computer to draft
your weekly plan. We will discuss more details on
this in the succeeding sections.

PAGE 05
 DAILY SMALL WINS

2
Timeboxing

"Procrastination is opportunity's assasin." -Victor Kiam

Do you struggle to manage your workload? Feel overwhelmed due to the

huge task you are facing because of your procrastination? Have you ever
had a day wherein you only finished one task because you took too much
time on it? It's infuriating to see that you only ticked one task off of your list,
right? To be productive, you need to manage your time wisely. Thus,
putting a timeline or time frame on your to-do list is a good habit to master.
When you have a timeline to follow, you're putting time pressure on
yourself, pushing you to work and finish your task on time. This is where a
tool called Timeboxing comes into play. Timeboxing is one of the most
effective tools that you can use. When I started to employ this method a few
years back in my personal and professional life, my productivity increases
and it help me to stop procrastination. In this section, I will show you how to
effectively manage your task and your workload by Time Boxing.

PAGE 06
 DAILY SMALL WINS

What is Timeboxing?

Timeboxing is allocating a specific time, called

timebox, for each planned activity. One example is
when you are going to do a presentation. You
allocate how much time you'd spend on each topic.
When the time is up, you move on to another topic.

Timeboxing is a simple and effective solution that

works by allocating set periods – or “timeboxes” – to
each of your activities.

Some of the benefits of mastering timeboxing are

getting to stay focus on the critical stuff and
avoiding multitasking. It gives you the ability to stay
productive and manage your time better.

It is also a good practice since it shows and forces

precise results. Timeboxing can be hard at first, but
once you get used to it, it would feel more freeing
than constraining.

Benefits of Timeboxing
It forces you to think about the time required for
your work.
It helps you to convert intentions into actions.
It helps to prevent procrastination.
It creates a record of how you spend your time.

PAGE 07
 DAILY SMALL WINS

How to Set-up Timeboxing?

1. Create Your Weekly Plan

Refer to Habit No. 1: Plan Your Day on how to create

your Weekly plans. A good plan should list down all
your planned activities daily with specific time
duration and importance.

Let me give you more detailed examples on this. For

the interest of our study, let us take a look at the
weekly plans illustrated on the left.

ILLUSTRATION 2
Weekly plans created using Notes and Reminders
on iPhone and Android phone. The same content
slightly different in how it was formatted but both
serves the same purpose.

ILLUSTRATION 3

PAGE 08
 DAILY SMALL WINS

How to Set-up Timeboxing?

ILLUSTRATION 4 2. Set-up Your Calendar For Timeboxing

A TIMEBOX OR TIMEBLOCKING EXAMPLE
CREATED USING CALENDAR ON YOUR PHONE,
TABLE OR PC.
EACH TASK WAS COLOR CODED AND SPECIFIC
TIME WAS ALLOCATED DURING THE DAY. After completing your Weekly Plan, you can now
set-up your calendar for time boxing.

Let us go over the key points in the above example.

Only block tasks that take 30 minutes or longer.
This will ensure that your task is properly given
attention to on your calendar.
Block more than you think you need. Always
have a buffer time allocated in case certain tasks
will exceed. I always allow extra time on those
key tasks or meetings which might take longer
than I thought due to unforeseen factors.

PAGE 09
 DAILY SMALL WINS

How to Set-up Timeboxing?

Avoid blocking out your entire day where

there’s no space between tasks for short breaks.
You will notice on the above calendar that I
allocated blank timeboxes in case there is an
urgent task pop-up during my day.

For certain tasks, you may need to schedule

multiple time blocks over a few days.

Aim to leave some blank space in your calendar

each day.
ILLUSTRATION 5
I BLOCK 9 TO 11AM TO WORK ON MY
PRESENTATION MATERIALS.
I ALLOCATE ANOTHER 30 MINUTES IN CASE I NEED Set-up a specific calendar for each task.
MORE ADDITIONAL TIME.
THIS CATEGORY IS CALLED BUFFER TIME.

You can see on the below calendar the time

blocks with different colors. Those colors signify
a specific segment or compartment of your task.
This is a good way to visualize your task in day,
giving you more focus during your work.
Different color codes like Green means this is
work-related tasks, Blue color is my personal
task, Red color is tasks related to my business. In
this example, I usually use Calendar on my Apple
devices to create but you can also use Google
calendar and other applications.

ILLUSTRATION 6
THE RED TIMEBOX IS MY BUSINESS TASK.
I NEED TO BREAK THIS TASK INTO 2 BLOCKS (9AM
AND 1:30 PM) IN ORDER TO HELP ME REFRESH
AND FOCUS ON THE TASK.
THREE (3) HOURS OF CONSECUTIVE DEEP WORK.

PAGE 10
 DAILY SMALL WINS

How to Set-up Timeboxing?

In Summary, Timeboxing, or Time Blocking as

others might call it is an effective way to manage
your time and improves your productivity.

It helps you to overcome procrastination in your

work as it provides a more structured and
systematic way to handle your work. This is a good
small habit you can develop.

So give it a try!

PAGE 11
 DAILY SMALL WINS

20% of adults tend to procrastinate or

Key Summary putting off tasks by exchanging for
more pleasurable things.
Procrastination is a bad habit that we
should overcome before it can damage
our promising career.
There are anti-procrastination tools that
we can use to overcome this bad habit.
Planning Your Day and Timeboxing are
two of the tools we can use.
You can plan your task on a daily,
weekly, and monthly period. This helps
you to organize the priorities of your
tasks.
Timeboxing is allocating a specific time,
called timebox, for each planned
activity.
Timeboxing is a simple and effective
solution that works by allocating set
"You cannot periods – or “timeboxes” – to each of

escape the your activities.

responsibility of
tomorrow by
evading it today."

-Abraham Lincoln

PAGE 12
 DAILY SMALL WINS

Contact Us! Daily Smallwins..

Our team seeks to provide:

1. Awareness of the importance of productivity

in our personal and most especially in our
corporate lives.

2. We aim to provide tools and time-saving

techniques to improve our career life and
overcoming procrastination.

3. We provide unlimited coaching and support

on key issues related to productivity, time-
saving, goal-setting, planning, and others.

For further information, kindly visit our site

below:

www.dailysmallwins.com
[email protected]

PAGE 13