If you used to procastinate and you are now efficient...how did you do it?

[Eastie77Returns]

I have a To Do list. The things on it are not particularly complex or even time consuming but I just cannot get my shit together and get them done. Things like taking stuff to the recyling centre...it's a 10 minute drive from here but I'm just bogged down by inertia. The thought of putting stuff in the car...

Sometimes I just sit in silence looking at the list, at things that have been on there for weeks or months that I could have done in minutes.

Every now and again I devote time to working through it. I sit down and say to myself "I'm going to spend the next x hours just getting this stuff completed". Then I get completely side tracked and an hour has passed, nothing done.

If you used to be like this, what did you find helped you change?

ADHD medication.

An app for ADHD body doubling, and I set myself small sessions of 20 mins to do things instead of looking at all the tasks and getting overwhelmed.

read the book Atomic Habits by James Clear, he also has some great videos on youtube which I also watch every once in a while.

The idea is to break the tasks you hate into their smallest components and do a minute or two each day every day rather than try to do too much. Doing a tiny portion is less pressure e.g. 1 minute of my accounts (which I hate doing). Same sort of thing for projects - find the easiest part of it and do that for a minute. when you come back to it the simple fact that you have done a tiny bit tricks your subconscious into keeping going / going for longer.

I also use a great app called Tick Tick for scheduling recurring tasks and ticking them off daily - all the ones I hate like accounts, or cleaning the toilet etc etc.

Get busier. People naturally stretch a task to fill the time (or in my case be just a bit too much to fill the time).

So when I have more to get done, I blast through most of it, again leaving a few low priority tasks that never seem to get done.