My random approach to successfully defeat procrastination and other time consuming habits.

In this story, I’ll share my experiment to defeat procrastination almost effortlessly and immediately.

The lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic along a generalized anxiety syndrome have really messed up my working habits lately. Slowly, I started taking more and more time to get up from bed in the mornings because I was reviewing multiple apps on my phone that were consuming my time in non-productive ways. To complicate things further, this behavior eventually repeated through the course of the day and before sleeping time. This caused me a feeling of guilt at nights, making me think that I could be more productive, or that I could use my spare time in a healthier way. Therefore, I decided to do something and developed a new method to fight against procrastination and time consuming habits.

Random reduction of time consuming habits

I thought I needed a simple strategy with minimum willpower involved to go on. That’s how I came with this idea to not fight against my consuming habits, but rather, leave them to luck. Now, whenever I feel the urge, need, curiosity or any feeling to grab my phone, I just do it. However, before opening my usual time consuming apps, I roll some dice and try to guess their results. If I roll 1's I give permission to myself to open the app, otherwise, I find something else to do with my time. In the example below, my purple, blue, red, and green dice, represent my Mail, Facebook, YouTube, and WhatsApp apps, which means I can check my Mail, but not the other apps.

Figure 1. Purple, blue, red, and green dice for Mail, Facebook, YouTube, and WhatsApp. A result of 1 means permission to check them. “Dice” rolling app.

That’s how I started rolling virtual dice every time I felt the need to check my phone. But, just before the first day of my experiment, I checked the screen time recorder of my phone to do a comparison 1 week later.

Time on the screen before and after random reduction of time consuming habits

I got so surprised when I saw that my phone recorded 46 shameful hours of screen time distributed between YouTube, Facebook, Castbox, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Chrome among other apps in just 7 days. That is like staring at the phone 2 whole days a week, I thought! Sure, I can argue that most of my 28 to 29 hours on YouTube during the week previous to my experiment are attributed to background music I play to help me sleep rather than just watching nonsense stuff. Still, that seemed like a lot of time to me. Also, I got very concerned about 5 hours on Facebook, because I often end up scrolling through tons of publicity and pages not relevant to me. Fortunately, the roll of the dice allowed me to decrease my screen time from 27% to 15% just in the first week of its implementation. I felt so glad to see my two big time leeches decrease from 29 and 5 hours to 11 and 3 hours approximately. I felt like a winner immediately! But, why was luck so helpful to fight against time consuming habits, I wondered.

Figure 2. Screen time before and after the implementation of the random reduction approach.

Why I think the random reduction approach worked for me

So, the success of the experiment was clear to me. My screen time reduced significantly with the roll of the dice. It’s obvious that this decrease is luck dependent and that results may vary with time, however, the probabilities are rigged to keep me away of time consuming habits. And I think this luck factor represents the beauty of this approach because I actually feel excited with the roll of the dice. Maybe that little adrenaline release is enough to satisfy my feeling to check the phone despite of not getting 1’s in the roll. Also, I don’t need to use willpower to keep distant from the phone, I just check it as usual. In fact, I was so surprised to see I had 148 phone unlocks in both periods of the experiment. I must admit that it was just a casualty to get exactly the same number however, this only makes more evident how much time I saved by dropping the phone after an unsuccessful but exciting dice roll.

Final thoughts

I really enjoyed developing and implementing my random approach on myself. I got so happy with the results that I decided to share them with the world. In fact, the time saved allowed me to read some pages of a book, keep me more focused at my work, write part of this article and even enjoy those lucky times I got 1 to reproduce my favorite songs on YouTube without that disgusting feeling of guilt for not being productive.