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I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a student, in high school or college, who doesn’t know how to procrastinate. We’re procrastination masters, myself included. After all, I just spent the past few hours staring blankly at the same posts on Facebook and googling answers to life’s greatest and most random questions (you know, the ones that only feel important when you have a big essay due in two days, like “Why are pothole covers round instead of any other shape?”).
The thing about procrastination is you totally know what you’re doing as you’re doing it. Count yourself lucky if you don’t know what I’m talking about – any experienced procrastinator knows exactly what work they need to do, but they’re just not doing it. Whether you’re surfing your impressive collection of social media websites, or you accidentally started a new season of The Walking Dead or Orange is the New Black, you know you’re ignoring that nagging voice in the back of your head telling you, “STUDY!” Whoops.
When I look back as a college student at all the hours in high school I spent doing practically nothing, I regret the time wasted. Now I think I’ve figured out the problems, though fixing them in my college life is still difficult (if not harder, since my parents aren’t around!).
I didn’t know by WHEN I needed to do WHAT.
I was much better at keeping all my assignments together in middle school, when I immediately took out my school planner whenever my teacher gave homework or scheduled a test. By the time senior year rolled around, I had lazy blank-page days; as a college student, I sometimes have blank weeks – though, in my defense, I use a digital to-do list on my laptop now.
Figuring out what I actually need to get around doing is often that first step that everyone evades, and I was definitely no exception to the rule. I’ve figured out through experience and experimenting that it’s not a bad idea to take a leaf out of middle school Emily’s book and write assignments down before I forget them. For instance, I had one week this semester where I completely forgot an essay was due until the night before, which could’ve been prevented by jotting down the assignment details in class in the appropriate date in my planner, rather than referring to an outdated syllabus. Though I finished, I lost a lot of sleep I shouldn’t have needed to sacrifice.
My tasks were too big.
Okay, let’s be real here — who wants to write an essay? I enjoy writing and even I put off my essay for much too long, because the idea of developing my ideas into a five-paragraph essay was just too much to start. The task seems so huge I didn’t touch it until the last minute, typing furiously at 3 in the morning even though my eyes wanted nothing more than to close for the night. Worth it? No way.
The common solution is to split your big tasks into smaller ones, which I did: I chopped my essay up into outlining, quotation selection, and then writing the actual paragraphs with analysis. It actually wasn’t that bad. My fatal mistake was not scheduling days I wanted to be done with each piece of the task, to avoid doing it all at once the night before like I ended up doing. If I’d outlined 5 days before the draft deadline, picked the quotations the next night, and written a body paragraph per night, the essay wouldn’t have been such a struggle.
This step really has two parts: splitting the tasks, of course, but also treating these smaller tasks as actual unique tasks — assignments of their own. That means each piece would have its own deadline, too, speeding up the procrastination process and getting work done sooner.
I didn’t have anyone keep me accountable.
Besides myself, who definitely didn’t count and still doesn’t! You are the worst at keeping yourself accountable, just like every other procrastinating student out there. With temptations left and right (and no, I definitely did not just go scroll through puppy Vines for an hour and a half), any student will have difficulty keeping focused unless they possess some intense iron will.
What I did during high school to stay focused and accountable was I choose to study with friends rather than alone as much as possible. My high school held a “Homework Center” three days a week after school, so I’d make it my mission to finish Calculus homework during that time. Going to Homework Center with two of my friends kept me on task so much more than if I had gone straight home and attempted to work with my laptop and other distractions right next to me.
I didn’t fully eliminate my distractions.
Speaking of distractions, we are virtually and physically surrounded by them in this day and age. There is practically no escape from the social media notifications constantly pinging on our cell phone displays, because even if we turn on the Do Not Disturb settings, our hands are just trained too well to reach over and check. Oh yeah, just checking the time.
Things my friends used and recommended to me include cutting the Internet altogether on your computer – just turn your WiFi off! – or using Chrome and other browser extensions such as StayFocusd that’ll block your frequently visited social media sites for you during a specified period of time, aka work time. I personally wasn’t a big fan of StayFocusd since it was so easy to just disable and delete the extension, so physically moving my computer away was the best way to go for me.
I hope that helps put you on the track for productivity, not procrastination!
(And for those of you who are curious, round manhole covers are more convenient because the circular-shaped cover won’t fall through into the hole, and you don’t need to match the cover to any specific orientation because it’s the same shape no matter how you put it down. I’m telling myself it wasn’t a waste of time to look up these questions because apparently Apple asks this one as a job interview question.)
Got any tips to kick procrastination? What’s a time you procrastinated? Tell us in a comment below.
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