After starting to getting things done, I noticed that I still procrastinate. Procrastination is evil. There should be religions around Anti-Procrastination, gathering in cults and praying to keep procrastination at bay.

With this in mind I’ve picked up a few tips, here and there, that help me to avoid procrastination:

Mail client auto -update only every two hours

Teach yourself not to have the email client open. If you have to, then turn the auto-check for messages to a two hour interval. If your email was that critical that needed to be checked once or twice a minute, someone would call you. Other than that, it’s even good discipline to let it sit for a couple of minutes in your inbox so you can reply to your mail with a clear head. While your at it, you can also clean your Inbox. If you don’t know hot to do it, check out Inbox Zero, some great stuff there. Having a clean Inbox lets you focus on what’s important, and kill that weird feeling of having your email application closed, because you don’t feel like you could be doing something on you inbox, and you also don’t fiddle with your mail in endless loops.

Feeds twice a day

Must of us have RSS feeds. I like using Liferea to check for fresh news straight out of the feed pipe. But you should teach yourself to check twice a day, max. I try to do it once in the morning and once at night. But close your RSS application afterwards, because if not, you’ll end up clicking that evil update button, and procrastinating just a little more. Open it, read it, close it and be done with it. You’ll enjoy more having a bunch of feeds to read, with useful information, and you’ll also skip the crap more willingly, i.e. you won’t read a feed just because it’s the only new thing on your plate.

Browser scrapbook/notes

As all modern people, I use instant messaging, it’s become a work tool. But, it’s incredible the amount of people that paste links on your chat window. Be it for fun, for info, for work, for teasing or just bothering, everybody has a link to share. Youtube, google video, metacafe, digg, engadget, slashdot, you name it, everybody always has something. If you always go through those links right away (hey, my IM windows popped up or flashed), you’ll waste a couple of hours every day. To kill this procrastination evil seed (yes, because when you’re on youtube you have to check out a couple of related videos also, and things are getting not done), I came up with a strategy. Use a scrapbook. Firefox has it. If not, use tomboy notes. If not, use a text file. Put all those links in the same place, and check them out at night, when you’re at home relaxing. You’ll laugh harder and feel more relaxed (you won’t be trying to hide your screen deep in your cubicle).

That’s all the pearls of wisdom so far. Hope it helps any other lost soul besides me…