The most troublesome aspect of starting to work on something new is not the difficulty of that new task itself, but rather the shift in your focus from what you are already accustomed with. For example, preparing for an exam is difficult, but it is way more difficult to get yourself to stop thinking about going out and playing with your friends, or playing games, or even just sleeping for hours and hours on end. This very tendency to think about things that are more likeable to us, leads us to want to try and revert back to doing them. This is the beginning of procrastination, and it starts from you just thinking about doing something other than what you should be doing, and it ends with you forgetting about what you were initially doing completely until you are forcefully reminded of its importance. By this logic, you should be able to stop procrastination quite easily – all you really have to do is to learn how to control your own mind. Such a generic statement is of course not very useful to us, as it tells us nothing about how we should be equipped to deal with procrastination. After all, even though is sounds simple enough, we often procrastinate unconsciously rather than consciously as it does not even appear as a choice for us until it is already too late. At that point, we really only have one option to choose from and that is to revert back to our comfort activity. Even if we do get a heads-up, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we will be able to do what is right and not what we want to do at that moment. This is where this 5 second rule comes into play.
The 5 second rule allows you to become aware of the root cause of procrastination well before it transforms into a malignant nightmare, as well as give you a way on how you should approach coming up with a solution for it for your specific case. It has two important parts:
- Become aware of the cause of procrastination, and
- Navigate yourself away from it.
Developing awareness of Your Thoughts
To nip the evil of procrastination in the bud, you should focus on its root cause i.e. the deviant thoughts about things that you can no longer assign any time to. The reason I ascribe this as the root cause is because the more you allow such thoughts to fester in your mind, the more difficult it will actually be for you to stop yourself from indulging in it. You cannot magically stop thinking about what you liked to do just tomorrow, but you can atleast become aware of it early on by becoming aware of what you thinking about. Whenever you find yourself thinking about a fantastic “what if” scenario, remember that you are only allowed to give yourself 5 seconds for it. If you become aware of it before this time has passed, then it is fine. But, if it has already been more than 5 seconds, then you need to immediately pull yourself out from this scenario as it violates the 5 second rule. This rule has to be considered as a personal oath you make to yourself, for yourself. No one else will become aware of it, but you need to hold yourself accountable to it.
You should take this approach as a simple exercise and try to implement it in your life for just a few days. You will gradually find yourself more in tune with your own thoughts, and it will also drastically limit the substantial loss of your time that originated from one random thought.
Don't Force yourself to not think about something
It is only the first step to become aware of when you are allowing yourself to get carried away with useless thoughts about things that are purely a figment of your imagination, or are things that are real but are on a much lower priority than whatever it is that you are currently doing. What comes next is how to actually stop yourself from it and move on to the task at hand.
Your mind cannot be taught to not think about something. It is just not how our brains perceive thoughts in general. For example, you cannot tell yourself to not think about a car. If you tell yourself that, then you will only start thinking about cars as not thinking about them means to think about anything other than it, which is generally everything else in your mind. This is too big a sample space and your mind cannot instantly choose to focus on something unless a special cue triggers that thought for you. In order to stop thinking about something, you should focus only on the first thing that comes to your mind, that is not related to what you were originally thinking, and investing your thoughts to it no matter what. Do not try to make this a challenge for yourself to not think about something, and try to instead think about something else instead. The former is you trying to go against how your mind works, and it will only invite additional trouble for you. A good analogy will be to think about you moving to a different branch or sub-branch of the tree rather than abruptly cutting down the branch itself.
