NewDay

A mindful approach to tackling procrastination and achieving focused work

The goals of this app are two-fold, one is to provide a tool to fight procrastination and start working on a task, the second is to make task execution more mindful by using the Pomodoro technique and making goal setting a part of work flow.

One of the underlying causes of procrastination are the negative emotions associated with the task. This app uses mindfulness and cognitive behavioral techniques to tackle procrastination at its root by identifying and consciously changing the negative thoughts associated with this task. Secondly procrastination is almost always related to starting a task, once started most of us can continue working without issue.

The app intends to provide an approachable, guided technique to this process. Each step is meant to be fairly easy, while taking you one step closer to getting started on a task. We start with describing the task, we then understand our emotional state. Documenting and observing our emotional state and describing it can in itself reduce the tumult of emotions. The next step is to identify the underlying thoughts that cause the unpleasant emotions associated with procrastination, the app provides a set of common thoughts that most people who procrastinate face. Once these thoughts are documented the next step is to talk back to them and provide alternative positive thoughts, again, examples are provided. Once we've fought our negative thoughts, we can actually start working on the task.

There exists an option to skip the above steps and start working on a task directly for those who have no problems with procrastination. In this step, we attempt to do our task in a more mindful and focused manner. We start with a breathing exercise to calm the mind. The goal of mindful work is then approached through two avenues, first we use the Pomodoro technique while working to work in focused bursts of shorter duration (though the length is configurable - the recommendation is 25 minutes). This saves time but also ensures that when we're working we avoid distractions and our work is of higher quality. The second aspect is by defining at a low granularity what we're going to be working on in each burst/Pomodoro we ensure that we have a clear plan for each time period and we're mindful of the progress that we're making with time.

Together all of this should allow us to tackle tasks that would usually cause us to procrastinate and to do them in a focused way to produce higher quality output and save time.

To summarize, the features of this app are

1) A guided approach to tackling procrastination.

2) An option to skip the guided approach and start the tasks directly.

3) Mindfulness based techniques of understanding the thoughts that cause us to procrastinate.

4) Crafting alternative positive thoughts with examples provided.

5) A Short breathing exercise to calm the mind before starting a task.

6) Approach task execution mindfully by planning for small sub-tasks to be executed in each work session/Pomodoro.

7) Use the Pomodoro technique for short focused bursts of work, rather than long drawn out work sessions.

This app was written as a way for me to fight my own habits of procrastination, I hope you find it useful too.

User feedback has indicated that this app was also helpful to users whose anxiety and depression made procrastination a large hurdle to cross.