How to procrastinate less

In this newsletter, I want to offer a counter-intuitive way to waste less of your time on your chess vice: by planning your distractions.

All or nothing

For years, I’ve tried to be the perfect chess improver - and now the perfect self-employed chess coach. And I failed miserably. I slowly realize this isn’t my bad, but I just have an utterly unrealistic vision of what is possible.
This hope of being perfect had some problems, too - for example, the planning procrastination I wrote about a few weeks ago. So now I have a new goal - limiting the distractions and non-ideal things. To achieve that, I’m now planning my distraction time.
Yup, you read that right. My way of limiting procrastination is to plan to procrastinate. This might sound ludicrous, but please read till the end; it will make sense.

When do I procrastinate?

Once I gave up on my zero procrastination goal, I faced a new challenge. Every moment of the day felt like the ideal time to use my little procrastination time now.
Well, by the end of the day, I used up dozens of “Now is my procrastination time. I promise it’s the last one,” and I didn’t get anything done. Shit, that clearly didn’t work. Even if I had a particularly good day, I fought every moment against procrastination and wasted a lot of energy this way.
So here comes the power of planned procrastination time. If I know I have a specific time for procrastination in the evening, it is way easier for me to say no to an instinct to check Twitter, watch a YouTube video, or read the news. I can simply tell myself: I will have time to do that in the evening. This means I can finally focus on doing what matters throughout the day without having to fight a hopeless battle.

Anti-addiction method

This is not a crazy Noël idea - but an idea that is used in addiction therapy as well. In a surprising podcast episode, Dr. Alok Kanojia (better known as HealthyGamerGG) revealed that he uses the same method with porn-addicted clients. Instead of going cold turkey, he agrees on times the client knows they will be able to watch adult films. This allows them to stay away from it throughout the day.
Over time, the amount of times and length of these planned sessions decrease, and saying no gets easier and easier.
Another Doctor and licensed psychiatrist, Dr. Anna Lembke, argues in her fantastic book Dopamine Nation that we all are addicted to something. Some of us just have less socially accepted addictions like drugs or adult films. While others (me included) are addicted to screens, romance novels (Anna’s story), playing chess, or work, things that society doesn’t see as evil.

So, instead of pointing fingers at others, we can be humble and learn from the addicts who get proper treatment. Because, let’s face it, we all are (potential) addicts.

Plan your fun chess activity - train better.

I have found that the planning procrastination method works for chess, too. Plan your training - and a little bit of chess procrastination time. This way, you will actually be able to do the training without succumbing to the temptation of the latest (insert your biggest procrastination activity in chess).
By planning both training and procrastination ahead of time, you can decide what your ratio of chess enjoyment and real chess training should be. For this process to work, you need to have 0 expectations during your chess enjoyment time and make sure you really do something that improves your chess during the training time.
If you end up scrolling Twitter as a fun activity but then watch YouTube videos on the latest silly gambit in your ‘training time,’ you won’t improve.
Procrastination time should actually help people to do hard and smart training.

Suddenly, procrastination is not fun anymore.

What I’ve been most surprised about is that sometimes I do not even feel like using my full procrastination time. This has to do with the nature of procrastination. Usually, it isn’t the activity itself that is tempting, but we want to escape from a certain activity.
Cleaning your whole house suddenly gets tempting when otherwise you’d have to learn for a hard and annoying exam. That has absolutely nothing to do with cleaning your house being fun...
Once you do the hard thing, you’ll be proud of yourself. And maybe feel that you can do better things than scrolling Twitter or watching your 31st opening course, even if you’d be allowed to do just that.

Start Small

You can even start with something as small as 15min proper training and 1 hour of procrastination time a day. Over time, you’ll realize that the training helps you and can also be fun! On the other hand, procrastination just wastes your time, and sometimes it isn't that fun, either. So, you build up training time while decreasing the procrastination time. So, when are you going to procrastinate this weekend?

Keep improving,
Noël

This article was originally posted on my Blog, nextlevelchess.blog. You can read other articles by clicking this link.

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