I have had a dice on my desk for the last few weeks — I’m not sure where it came from — but I didn’t get rid of it, thinking that someday I would find a use for it. And yesterday I did.
We all have a few small tasks which we really don’t want to do, that stay on our to-do lists for weeks, months or even years, that we procrastinate on. Sometimes we will get around to doing one of them, and it will only take a couple of minutes, and we think “why the hell didn’t I do this months ago? It was so easy. What was I worried about?” So we tell ourselves to just do these tasks in future, stop procratinating, and not to sit on them for ages. But we soon fall back to the old procrastinating ways.
Well here is a fun way of getting through these tasks or todos, getting things done, and improving your productivity (a procrastination hack, I suppose):
Write a list of five of the tasks that have been hanging around for a while, and add a fun task on to the end of the list, making six tasks altogether. Next, number them from 1 to 6. Now roll the dice and immediately do the task that corresponds with the number you have rolled. When you have finished that task, roll again.
The tasks should be fairly short, like Next Actions — the idea is to knock off a few tasks over a short period of an hour or so. Examples might be making a doctor appointment, booking the car into the garage, writing a quick reply to a difficult email, phoning a late paying customer, making a follow-up sales call, or clearing your desk.
Here are a couple of variations:
- Make a list of five tasks, numbered 1 to 5. Roll the dice and do the corresponding task. When you roll a 6, you can stop until the next day.
- Make a list of 12 tasks and number them so you have two tasks numbered 1, two tasks numbered 2, and so on. Roll the dice and either choose from the two correspondingly numbered tasks, or do the first correspondingly numbered task (but choose which method you are going to use before you start, or this might introduce another source of procrastination).
- Use two dice and 12 tasks.
If you haven’t got a dice handy, you could either make a spinner from an hexagonal piece of card with numbers 1 to 6 on each edge and half a cocktail stick through the middle, or write the numbers 1 to 6 on pieces of card or paper, turn them face down, shuffle them round and pick one.
I hope you find this useful. Let me know in the comments if you have any other ideas for using a dice, and especially let me know if you have any success with this technique.
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