Five tips to stop procrastinating even if you are a chronic addict.

 

 

Do you know what procrastination does to you?

Procrastination makes you delay or put-off tasks or responsibilities, often resulting in negative consequences such as increased stress, decreased productivity, and missed opportunities.

Procrastination can also hurt one's mental and physical health, leading to increased anxiety, guilt, and even depression. Procrastination can create a vicious cycle where the more one procrastinates, the more stressed and overwhelmed one becomes, making it even harder to start and complete tasks.

Procrastination can have significant negative consequences on an individual's life, and it's important to develop strategies to overcome it. 

Below are five tips anyone can use to procrastinate less:

1. Chunk your work. Instead of seeing your assignment or project as one big task, break it up or “chunk” it into smaller, more manageable pieces. “Write an introduction” might be one piece, and “Outline main pieces of evidence” might be another. This will help you to get started on doing some work, and these little bits of work will boost your confidence to tackle more, thus decreasing your likelihood of procrastinating.

2. Create artificial deadlines.  Make sure you do not work with the actual deadline. To counteract this procrastination-inducing delay, create artificial deadlines for yourself and work with them. If your entire paper is due 31 November, create your schedule where the introduction is “due” 31 September, the body is due 31 October and the conclusion is due 15 November. Give yourself a deadline to complete a task aside from the normal or actual deadline.

3. Treat yourself. Give yourself a good pat on the back after completing a task. You deserve it. It helped you to release stress and enjoy your win. So pick something you find personally rewarding or enjoyable (say a milkshake or an hour of video games) and treat yourself after the successful completion of your task.

4. Work from a different location.  Common work locations are often full of distractions. Instead, if you have an important task to finish, drive to a new neighbourhood and work in a coffee shop you have never been to. Or take your laptop to a hub and work from there. Try finding a new work location. Sometimes it helps in creating good concentration and fresh ideas.

5. Turn off your phone (and WiFi, if possible). Here’s another thing that will dramatically improve your odds of resisting procrastination by minimising distraction: turn your phone off when you sit down to work. Sometimes the most distracting things are quick jumps into social media or email. If your phone is off, it’s much harder to do this (and easier to stay focused). Another big question is: what if you work with your phone? Hahahahaha, learn and master self-discipline.

Many people who struggle with procrastination are quite harsh in the way they talk to themselves, often beating themselves up for procrastinating. But this overly negative, judgmental self-talk only makes it more likely that you feel the urge to “escape” the current situation with a pleasantly numbing distraction. So, when you feel the urge to procrastinate, remind yourself that it’s normal to want to procrastinate and doesn’t mean anything about you as a person. So don't beat yourself up much, just find ways to deal with the procrastination and deliver your tasks.

I hope this information has given you a new way to look at the problem of procrastination and some practical strategies you can use to fight back.

Remember, we all procrastinate sometimes. But if you can learn which of the factors is most likely to lead you into procrastination, you can take steps to deal with it ahead of time. Follow our social media handles for Admission and Scholarship tips.