Avoiding Procrastination- Tips and Tricks
Hello everyone! For my first post I’m going to be talking about procrastination, how to fight it and the best tip I’ve seen in relation to it.
Procrastination is the bane of every student, but in case anyone doesn’t know what it means, procrastination is defined as ‘the action of delaying or postponing something.’ Procrastination leaves us with a temporary feeling of relief of not having to deal with the unwanted task, but the more we postpone something the more anxiety we actually create, until it reaches the point where it is impossible to avoid the task any longer, or we simply don’t ever complete it.
Even when we understand what is happening, however, its still a really hard habit to get out of. Naturally we’ll be lead to the least painful tasks first, avoiding the unwanted one and gaining that temporary relief. So how do we stop this?
One of the best tips I’ve ever seen in relation to procrastination, and one that has helped me so much, is this; spend 5 minutes on task, then if you still don’t want to do it, move on. 5 minutes may not seem like a huge amount of time to be productive in, but it is still 5 minutes of work you didn’t have done before! The task isn’t untouched anymore. and some of that anxiety is taken away, and you are in a better place than when you started. Whether you just made a plan or wrote the introductory paragraph to a dreaded essay, you didn’t avoid the task. You started it, and you may even find it wasn’t as bad as you thought, and return to finish it sooner.
Take this approach and soon enough you may find yourself more organised and less stressed about things you haven’t completed; you’ve made a start and have made more progress than you would have if you procrastinated completely. I also find it really helps with any feeling of guilt you may have surrounding the avoidance.
Below I have put a link to a ted talk video about procrastination that is really helpful if you’d like to learn more about why we keep this bad habit so easily!
Thank you for reading and I hope this helps!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arj7oStGLkU
