How to overcome fear of work

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

For those who work under stress, they constantly postpone things and missed deadlines.

There are people in the office who spend most of the day in the smoking room or in the kitchen. After midnight, they finish what they did not have time for the day. Eternal procrastination destroys their lives.

This is how I worked as an editor. I wrote articles for websites and checked the texts of freelancers - understandable tasks without rigid deadlines. The only difficulty was that sometimes I had to defend the project in front of the customer.

Apparently, this became the reason for the fear of work. I spent about 5 hours a day on tasks. The rest of the time was spent trying to force myself to do something. Then he began to postpone things for the weekend. I forgot about rest and personal life.

These techniques helped me to cope with the problem.

1. Do it quickly and badly

From Neil Fiore's Easy Way to Stop Procrastination, I learned about the fundamental problem of procrastination. We get lazy when our self-esteem is threatened.

My laziness looked like this. I thought: “I'll write an article, a client will come and reject everything. It means that I am incompetent and not worthy of my position. Better to do nothing. Procrastination protected me from imagined shame.

Indecision led to problems:

1. I pulled from the beginning. If he received a task, he immediately ran off to chat in the smoking room.
2. I was afraid to finish. The result never seemed good enough.

I realized that I needed to overcome my fear of incompetence. So I decided to do the work as relaxed as possible for a while. Became the worst version of myself. Interestingly, this has led to positive changes.

The quality of the result and the speed of work have increased. When I quickly and "badly" did the work, there was a lot of time left to bring it to mind. Once I showed the article as it is, without revision. It turned out that people generally do not see the flaws to which I attach importance.

How to implement

1. Imagine failure. The client asks to redo the work. The most unpleasant thing you will feel is awkwardness. You won't get beat up for a bad logo or text.
2. Do your work in a relaxed manner. Forget about mistakes, wording and shortcomings.
3. Do not redo until you complete the task completely. Usually, even in the process of writing, I went back to the beginning of the article to make changes, and it's like rereading a sentence 20 times in a book - it greatly slows down the work. The Write or Die service for authors helped to get rid of this habit. It's a text editor that doesn't let you stop. When you stop typing for 20 seconds, the screen turns red and the speakers make heartbreaking sounds.

2. Forgetting the word "must"

Neil Fiore believes that most motivational phrases only increase procrastination. Particularly dangerous are phrases with the word "must", for example: "I have to finish this project by Wednesday."

As soon as we say this word, we understand: "I do not want to do this." We owe the boss, the client, the family, the country. But of their own free will, they would never undertake this work. When we talk about duty, the brain rebelles like a naughty child.

"Nonsense! - one can rightly object. "A person has responsibilities: he must support his family, come to work, walk the dog in the morning." But why is it necessary to say “I have to support my family”? Better to say, "I want to provide everything my family needs" - this phrase emphasizes personal choice.

How to implement

Use wording that takes into account your choices, desires, and interests. Stop motivating yourself in an authoritarian manner. Forget the words "must", "must", "promised."

• Must write a diploma. → I decided to write a diploma.
• Obliged to hold out in a new place. → I will enjoy new tasks.
• He promised to finish the project by 10:00 on Friday. → When can you start working on a project?

It sounds naive, but the wording decides a lot.

3. Create pleasant associations with work

If people acted rationally, they would stop procrastinating. Unfortunately, we are acting unreasonably.

Most will put off unpleasant things, even if there is a reward in the future. Dan Ariely writes about this in the book "Positive Irrationality". The author describes how he contracted a rare form of hepatitis after a blood transfusion. To recover, he signed up for a trial of the newest drug. Three times a week, he had to give painful injections on his own. But there was a reward ahead - recovery.

As it turned out, the drug had side effects: after taking it, fever, nausea and headache appeared. Therefore, despite the effectiveness of the treatment, many patients missed the injections.

Dan did every injection according to plan, although he never excelled with willpower. He was helped by a cunning trick: after the injection, he lay down on the sofa and watched films. So the unpleasant procedure was associated with positive impressions of watching movies.

How to implement

To stop procrastinating tasks, I associated positive emotions with them. For this, he temporarily gave up tea and sweets - he left tea drinking only for the duration of work. Now, when I turn on the computer, I immediately look for what else to do. The brain associates work with cakes and cookies.

To make positive associations appear faster, add gamification to your routine. To do this, you can use the role-playing Habitica Task Manager. In it, you fight monsters, doing work in real life. After completing the quests, you get coins that can be spent on in-game weapons and armor.

4. Work in an absent-minded manner

In Think Like a Mathematician, Barbara Oakley writes about the existence of two modes of the brain: focused and absent-minded.

With focused thinking, we strain and focus on one task. In an absent-minded state, the brain rests and, as it were, thinks about everything in the world, processing information in a day.

You can spend hours solving a math problem, and then accidentally find the answer while walking. Therefore, sometimes it is more productive to relax or talk with friends than to think about the problem.

Absent-minded mode is essential for creativity. When we work in this state, we do not feel tension. Then insight comes to us. On the contrary, if we force ourselves to be creative, then we get tortured nonsense. Try to come up with a custom joke. I never did it.

How to implement

To enter diffuse mode, I pour tea, turn on the timer for an hour, and imagine a conversation with a friend in a cozy cafe. I record the entire imaginary conversation. An hour later, I have a finished draft of the article in front of me - all that remains is to edit it.

Simplified work looks like this:

• Gathering Information - Focused Mode.
• I am writing an article - absent-minded mode.
• Editing - focused mode.

I perform the most difficult part of the task in an absent-minded mode, that is, during rest.

5. Live in a compartment for one day

Before starting work, I constantly thought about the future, and it seemed terrible. Because of my mistake, the client threatens the company with a court. The people who trusted me lost their money through my fault. At work, my wages were delayed, and I could not pay the rent. I didn't have time to write my diploma because of work, so I stayed for the second year at the institute. And so on ad infinitum.

Although the events existed only in my fantasy, they interfered with my action in reality. Dale Carnegie's simple advice from How to Stop Worrying and Start Living helped to overcome unproductive thinking. It sounded like this: "Live in the compartment of today."

Complete tasks in order, without thinking about the past, future, rewards and punishments. Imagine that the past and the future are enclosed by airtight doors, like in a submarine.

How to implement

Set a goal, think over the steps to achieve it, and then focus on one specific task. Set the plan aside until you have completed the task at hand.

With the Speed Dial Launcher for Chrome, you can quickly bookmark and assign a hotkey to a page. Open your browser and go straight to the document you want. There is less chance that you will start doing something secondary or get distracted by messages on social networks.

6. Shorten breaks

I used to love working with the Pomodoro technique. You set the timer for 25 minutes and go about your business, trying not to be distracted. Then you rest for 5 minutes.

I loved that the break was a must. It doesn't matter how you work, there is still a well-deserved rest ahead. But it turned out that these five minutes only hurt. The tasks were not closed, and the irritation grew.

The problem was the adaptation of the brain. Dan Ariely writes in Positive Irrationality that we get used to any job and stop feeling unpleasant emotions. But after the break, we need to enter the working mode again.

Paradox: Taking a short break, as recommended in productivity articles, makes the task even more frustrating than it did at the beginning. Therefore, if you are cleaning or preparing a tax return, it is best to do it in one sitting.

How to implement

I do not always solve a problem at once, so I divide it into several subtasks. Moreover, I consider each item a separate mission, like in a computer game. I rest only when I have completed at least one point.

For convenience, I use checklists in the SimpleMind mind map program. The progress bar shows how much is left until the completion of the task.

7. Track progress

After the New Year, we tell ourselves that we are starting a new life: we will go in for sports, open a business, quit smoking or get another job. Usually the plans remain unfulfilled. First we postpone, and then we forget about promises.

In 12 Weeks of the Year, Brian Moran and Michael Lennington talk about how to deal with this problem. They suggest setting goals not for a year, but for 12 weeks. Each week, we must take specific steps to achieve the goal. And on Sunday to measure the effectiveness.

The authors recommend breaking down the results into two types:

1. The end result is to lose weight, save a million, get promoted, and improve relationships with family.
2. Performance indicators are actions that affect the achievement of the final result.

The end result sometimes depends on luck, so it is more important to monitor performance. They show how our actions and discipline change.

How to implement

Changes in performance are easy to track if they are specific and measurable. For example, a sales manager's plan is 500 cold calls a week, but he only called 250 customers. It turns out that the plan is only 50% fulfilled. Either the goal is unrealistic, or the manager is lazy.

For myself, I came up with a goal - to write seven articles in a week. In order to achieve the result, I decided to work 4 hours every day, without being distracted by social networks and news. On Sunday evening, I calculated the efficiency - it turned out 70%. It turned out that in a week I wrote five articles, but almost every day I met the performance indicators. This is an optimistic result: although it did not reach the goal, it improved concentration and discipline.

For the calculation, I use the already mentioned SimpleMind program. I mark tasks and performance indicators every day. The program automatically detects how much I have done, as a percentage.

Google Sheets is also suitable for this purpose. I put in the plan 4 hours of work without social networks and instant messengers. In the next column I write the actual number of hours at work. To calculate percentage efficiency, divide the values in the Completed column by the metrics in the Plan section.

Calculating the results of the weekly plan as a percentage, I began to notice the smallest changes in productivity. If he met indicators by less than 50%, then he simplified daily tasks. When the plan seemed too simple, he added new challenges.