<p>Hey guys I was wondering if you had any tips for me. I have a nasty habit of procrastinating and though I have definitely improved in doing my work in timely manner since high school I still find myself putting things off longer than I should have and it is starting to catch up with me. Also, I've had projects and mid-terms as of late and I think that too maybe part of it and I find myself choosing to do work for classes I consider more important than another. I was wondering if you had any time management skills to offer as well.</p>
<p>There are a couple of things that helped me deal with procrastination.</p>
<p>First: make a schedule.
If you have a lot to do, plan out what you are going to do each day for a certain amount of time at certain times. This gave me some place to start and not just keep slowly pushing things off. I always allotted more time than I thought I would need, and I never end up following the schedule exactly, but even this small amount of self-imposed structure can be really useful to get over that hurdle of getting started.</p>
<p>Second: doing something is better than doing nothing.
You don’t want to write that lab report? Procrastinate by writing some code for that project that’s due in a few weeks. Instead of spending all of your procrastination time staring at Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/CC, do something that vaguely productive that’s a lower priority. You will have to get these things done eventually, but if you do them now as a procrastination activity, they’re much less miserable and you’ll end up freeing up time in the future. It’s called structured procrastination, and it sounds really weird, but it has been useful for me.</p>
<p>Third: deadlines.
I have found having deadlines to be extremely motivating. So find ways to make yourself intermediate deadlines before the final one, so that you will make partial progress along the way instead of putting the whole thing off until the night before. This is the kind of thing that teachers made you do in middle/high school with outlines, rough drafts, etc. If self-imposing deadlines isn’t wholly effective, give yourself some accountability and consequences, like making an appointment at the writing center so that you have to finish a rough draft of a paper before that.
A correlate of this, for studying, is to set up a study group. Even if it’s just with a single friend or roommate, pick out times ahead of time when you can get together to study. The accountability of having someone else there and being able to bounce ideas off of each other can be productive, if done correctly. This is especially useful with concept/memorization-based classes (i.e., biology, psychology, organic chemistry, history).</p>
<p>Fourth: avoid distractions
This might be social media, friends, TV, whatever. Find a way to get away from them. Install an extension for your browser that will block sites like Facebook for a certain period of time and find a place to study (like the library) where there is no TV or roommates playing DDR and trying to get you to join.</p>
<p>Fifth: rewards.
It’s OK to take a break and reward yourself. This can make you more productive than just staring at a blank document for half an hour. Make deals with yourself, like if you write the introduction and methods section of the lab report, you can watch last night’s episode of The Daily Show or go and get a burrito. Just be careful to let yourself fall into the trap of Neflix’s autoplay…</p>
<p>That’s a lot of information, but hopefully I’ve said something useful. If not, I just provided you with a few minutes of things to read while procrastinating.</p>
<p>To add to the above, if you’re really having trouble sticking to deadlines, put money on it (or something else that’s important to you). Give a friend (that you trust!) a check for some amount of money (or cash) and say that they can keep/spend it if you don’t get XYZ done by this date. If you meet the deadline, then they give it back to you. You could also do the same thing with buying a friend dinner or giving them something of yours that they can keep or sell if you don’t meet a particular deadline. You might be more likely to do it if the consequences are tangible and immediate, rather than the more far-off consequences of a lower grade or something.</p>
<p>All of the above will help in curing the symptoms.</p>
<p>Let’s talk about curing the disease.</p>
<p>I am an avowed and reformed procrastinator myself, so I speak from experience here.</p>
<p>There’s a dangerous tendency as a procrastinator to deny your own agency. It’s easy to style yourself as a victim of circumstances you had no control over. It’s easy to complain of being overwhelmed by distractions. It’s easy to treat putting things off as part of your nature, an inherited trait as indelible as your eye color.</p>
<p>It’s much harder to own the habit, and recognize that you are the creator of it. And because it is harder to do so, accepting responsibility for procrastination is the thing you procrastinate most.</p>
<p>Look back on your own language about your habit, and you will see what I mean:</p>
<p>“I have a nasty habit of procrastinating” is more passive and evasive than “I procrastinate”</p>
<p>“I still find myself putting things off” (as if you walked in on yourself doing the deed) vs. “I put things off”</p>
<p>“I find myself choosing” (again with the walking in on yourself) vs “I choose” </p>
<p>The path to genuine redemption begins with acknowledging that procrastination is created by your choices, and will only be remedied by making better choices.</p>
<p>Procrastination may well be an addiction, although there’s still only limited research on the neurochemistry behind it.</p>
<p>What I do know is that the cure for it begins like the cure for any addiction: owning it. “Hi, my name is DSD, and I’m a procrastinator.”</p>
<p>Because it’s not really a time management problem. It’s an emotional and mental management problem. </p>
<p>It’s a SELF management problem.</p>
<p>I wish I’d realized that sooner, and I am glad I realized it soon enough.</p>
<p>I doubt I will be much help as I am a huge procrastinator myself. I do everything last minute. The one thing I found that helps me a little is changing up where I do things. When I come home (I am speaking as a high school student), I NEVER do any homework. As a matter of face, I should be doing mine right now. When I go to another person’s house or to the local library, I can do all my homework in about 2 hours because there is no TV around and I am already in that mindset that I need to get things done. I don’t want to waste all that gas for nothing. </p>
<p>May I ask, what do you tend to do while you procrastinate? Is it watch tv? Go on Facebook?</p>
<p>This summer I had a term paper to write for a class after the end of the semester. I went home and had a month to write the thing. I procrastinated on it completely for the first two weeks, and only got it done when I started going down to the public library for a few hours a day and committing to spend some time just working on it each day in this different setting. I was surprised by my progress when I just buckled down and got to work, and I got an A on it.</p>
<p>@DreamSchlDropout - If procrastination is a disease (and your comments about wording are not just an artefact of the OP’s writing style), what is the actual cure for this? I don’t see where you actually propose a way to deal with this.</p>
<p>I find that I procrastinate when (a) I overestimate how much time I have to get something done and (b) I’m really intimidated by my work so I try to avoid it as long as possible.</p>
<p>Recognizing the sources have really helped me learn from my mistakes. So try to think about why you procrastinate. Find patterns. When do you procrastinate, and what do these times have in common?</p>
<p>If you’re REALLY desperate: <a href=“http://www.stickk.com/howto.php?m=howto[/url]”>http://www.stickk.com/howto.php?m=howto</a>
This personally doesn’t work for me (it just makes my work seem more intimidating), but apparently it does work for a lot of people.</p>
<p>My point is that prescriptive measures alone won’t solve the problem, so no, I don’t provide “the actual cure”. </p>
<p>I believe the root cause is individualized and intimately tied to one’s own personal fears and anxieties. The specifics of what worked for me will likely miss the mark for someone who has different demons.</p>
<p>I will offer this: my thesis is that procrastination is an addiction. Recovery from addiction usually follows a well-worn path regardless of what the specific addiction is. The steps in any 12-step program can be relevantly applied to procrastination, beginning with the acceptance that you have the addiction and you are not in control of yourself.</p>
<p>Another approach that can work, and has provided me with some striking realizations about myself, is to analyze your own choices in the context of [Temporal</a> motivation theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_motivation_theory]Temporal”>Temporal motivation theory - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>Again, the specific actions you take in response will be personal, but the TMT equation raises a lot of excellent questions. And right questions can lead to right actions.</p>
<p>Some things I have asked myself:
- What outcome am I anticipating or expecting?
- Is it possible I am anticipating or desiring a positive outcome while expecting a negative one?
- How much confidence (or lack thereof) do I have relative to this task?
- How am I assigning value to the outcomes I foresee?
- Is my assessment of value accurate or distorted? Am I magnifying the negative ones and diminishing the positive ones? Or vice versa?
- How sensitive am I to the delay of the hoped-for outcome?
- Are my sensitivities about the delay of other activities with other outcomes clouding my judgment about the activity at hand? Am I letting perceived urgency outweigh perceived importance?
- How sensitive am I to the potential emotional impact of any negative outcome? </p>
<p>The point of all this questioning is to remind myself that I am the agent in all my choices, and by understanding my own motivational framework gain a perspective that makes it easier to make better choices.</p>
<p>I see it as a much simpler problem: it’s a matter of delayed vs. immediate gratification. It’s the same issue dealt with even back to decision making a toddler, just in a different situation on a different scale. Do you want the instant gratification of doing something else now (or the gratification of not doing something you don’t enjoy), or do you take the greater delayed gratification of doing it now and having the free time later.
There are greater, fine-grained complexities to it, of course, but I don’t see procrastination as an addiction, but rather something more natural and fundamental. I suppose you could argue that it is sort of a “soft addiction” falling into the behavioral addictions category, but that still seems really fuzzy, and I don’t think it quite meets the criteria (though I am not an expert on abnormal psychology…).</p>