Every time you pull your attention away from a distraction or decide not to give in to temptation, you use a small amount of time and energy. Even when you make the right choice, resources have been used up in doing so. You can avoid the need to do this and increase your time and energy for productive tasks by taking steps to avoid being distracted or tempted in the first place.

Planning

Planning allows you to make decisions before you are tempted to procrastinate, increasing your chance of choosing wisely. Here are some examples:

• Plan out your whole day ahead of time, so you aren’t faced with choosing what to do next when you are tired.
• Turn your phone off and put it out of sight so it can’t distract you with notifications or alerts.
• Make the right choice easy and the wrong choice hard, for example:
  • Put the TV remote in a drawer on the other side of the room.
  • Work in a separate space from where you play.
  • Put your phone away and out of sight when working.
• Have your office set up and ready to start work before you begin rather than setting up when you start work.
• Turn off notifications on your phones and email services.
• Schedule periods for deep focus where you remove all distractions and focus on one significant item.
• Schedule times during the day when you will review your email. Avoid it at other times.
• Schedule times during the day when you will use your phone. Avoid it at other times.
• Employ a website blocker to block websites that cause you to procrastinate.
• Delete apps that distract you. You can always download them again later if you find that you truly need them.

Threshold Decisions

Threshold decisions are the decisions that require a small amount of effort to initiate but lead to greater flow-on effects, for example:

• Deciding to sit in front of your computer, rather than the TV, which leads to work rather than procrastination.
• Deciding to sign up to an online class, which leads to you working on the various assignments later on.
• Deciding to give away your TV, preventing you from procrastinating by watching it in the future.
• Deciding to turn your phone off and leave it in another room while you work.
• Choosing to walk to work rather than drive.

If you can identify and use critical threshold decisions, you can conserve your willpower for other tasks.

These tools can help you channel your willpower:

• Creating a backup memory system.
• Using to-do lists.
• Planning your goals.
• Good habits help make tasks automatic, avoiding the need to use willpower to initiate them.