Top 5 Ways to Curb Your Procrastination
The Internet has become integral to the way that students research and write their papers, but in terms of procrastination, the Internet can be a frightening black hole. A quick jaunt over to Wikipedia to look up the Battle of Waterloo can quickly degenerate into three hours wasted reading about everything from brain-eating amoebas to unicorns to Kim Jung Il. Students often waste more time procrastinating and stressing out over their enormous to-do lists than they actually spend accomplishing their tasks in the end. Luckily, you can train yourself to avoid procrastinating by understanding your tendencies as a procrastinator and subverting them. Here are five helpful tips on how to curb procrastination and get your schoolwork done.
1. Stop Surfing, Start Working. Don’t surf the web when you have work to do. It can be extremely difficult to get things done when you have your favorite websites right at your fingertips. My own web-surfing addiction got to be such a problem, that I decided to take matters into my own hands and downloaded LeechBlock. LeechBlock is a Firefox add-on that blocks specified websites from your browser while you are doing your work. If I don’t have access to my “go-to” websites while I’m working, I’m a lot less likely to procrastinate.
2. Deal with Stress. Sometimes, I freak out so much about my work that I end up paralyzing myself to the point where I’m incapable of doing anything. Don’t freak out. Take a deep breath. Handling stress effectively is a habit that everyone should develop.
* First, if your stress is completely out-of-control, take a break. Don’t take the kind of break where you go and watch six episodes of Arrested Development instead of doing your work, but take a short break to regroup and refocus so that when you return to your work, you can handle it with renewed energy.
* Try to stay optimistic. It’s late, you have to turn in a paper first thing tomorrow morning, and you haven’t even started it yet. Be optimistic. Instead of telling yourself you can’t do it and giving into failure and procrastination, remind yourself that you are capable of doing your best.
* Talk about your stress. Even if it’s just a quick phone call to a friend or a family member, discussing your feelings will help you deal with your anxieties.
For more tips on how to deal with stress, check out this great article in Stress Management Blog about student stress.
3. Work with Others. It really helps to work with other people. Eduify gives students the ability to work with one another and get help from their peers, as well as from our team of certified experts. If I don’t know the answer to something or if I have trouble finding research, it’s a lot simpler just to ask for help than to spend hours trying to find a solution when I have more important things to be focusing on — like writing my paper.
4. Make a List. List making is essential when framing your mindset toward getting things done. According to this great NPR feature on procrastination, a full 70% of college students are procrastinators. They note that procrastination, for students, seems to “spawn a lot of homework eating dogs” and “sick grandmothers,” but that making a list is a great way to avoid the stress of holding things off to the last minute. Experts advise structuring tasks from order of most importance to least. In Structured Procrastination, an essay by John Perry, “Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact… With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.”
5. Reward Yourself For Meeting Deadlines. Instead of treating work as “all work and no play,” approach your work with a reward system. Make a deal with yourself. For every task you cross off your to-do list, reward yourself with something you enjoy, be it a coffee or snack break, or some leeway to surf YouTube for a while before heading to that next task. Though you may be stressed while you’re finishing your work, when everything is done, the biggest reward is the sense of accomplishment you will feel at setting a goal for yourself and reaching it!
