Posts Tagged ‘procrastination’

The cure for procrastination is to be busy

July 19th, 2009

If you’re someone who always leaves everything to the last minute, then the best thing to do is to make yourself busy–so busy that you have something due every minute. Take on more responsibilities at work, join more clubs at your university, organised the next outing for your friends. There are lots of things to do, and they’re easy to find.

You procrastinate because you feel like you have more time than you need to complete a task that you don’t like. The key word there is feel. If you feel the urgency of a deadline, you’re more likely to start now. There are two thought processes for procrastinating

1. If feel like you have plenty of time to do something you hate, why would you want to do it now, especially when you know that you’ll probably work on it until the deadline to make sure it’s finished? Wouldn’t you rather just start it as close to the deadline as possible so you spend as little time on it as possible while still getting it done? Besides, you have other things to do, so you end up doing completely different things while avoiding this one task.

2. You feel guilty that you haven’t done anything, so you try to start early. It’s too boring, and you don’t feel the urgency to actually work on it, so you end up wasting your time trying to do something, but end up doing nothing. This is the worst kind of procrastination; at least with the first kind, you worked on other things!

It all comes down to how you feel. If you feel like you have a lot of time or feel guilty about not having done anything, then make now the last minute you have to work on it. Got an assignment due next Friday and it’s only Monday? Schedule nights out with your friends every night except tonight. You’ll not only get it done tonight, but you’ll be enjoying yourself over the next few days with a peace of mind without the guilt!

There is a theory that people will take as much time as they are given to complete a task because of procrastination. If you make yourself feell like you have less time, and make that time now rather than later, you’ll finish it now.

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Staying Organized and Avoiding Procrastination

October 27th, 2008

Ever since my exam was moved back by 2 weeks, I haven’t had the urge to study; and since I’m working four days a week while only taking one subject at uni, I’m not around stressed out students all the time, so there hasn’t been the sense of urgency that would normally provoke me to at least open an ebook. I’m not even seeing my usual symptoms of pre-exam procrastination: spending excessive amounts of time preparing to study by cleaning my room, travelling far away to a quite place like a library, or writing a blog post about procrast…wait, there it is.

All ‘Wah’s aside, I’ve taken a new initiative to stay organized and hopefully avoid procrastination. I now have a todo list, and not my usual digital todo lists ranging from a simple notepad file, to emailing myself tasks, and perhaps most successfully, to using rememberthemilk.com. All of them had a common flaw, they were not accessible enough. I carry my laptop around me all the time, and can’t live without internet access for more than a day, so this realization came as a surprise to me. Getting email alerts, updating and editing things on a computer just doesn’t quite feel as satisfying as crossing out that final task on a physical notebook with a thick black pen–especially a pen that stutters. You know, one where you have to hold in your fist and scrape it against the paper at a 53.245 degree angle before it produces three millemeters of a smooth line followed by a 23mm long dent in the paper because the angle was a bit off.

$2.29 and a trip to Woolworth later, I now have a todo list I can hold in my hand (and no, you can’t get a PDA for that price). First item on the agenda: buy a todo list notebook. Done. Second item: write about it. Done. This feels great! Third item: throw out that fucking stuttering pen and get a new one. Done. Next item, study for half an hour…brb.

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