Don’t Let Procrastination Become Your Master
Written by Emmy Xie
Don’t Let Procrastination Become Your Master
Picture something. It is the start of a freshly new week, and your teacher have just given you a task that is required to be completed before next Monday. How will you finish that assignment?
Surely, the first thing you picture in your mind will be something like this:
Consistent effort throughout the week. Achievement of completion on Friday, with the flow of inspiration and ideas pushing you to the thrilling peak of efficiency. Not to mention earning spare time of refining the work on the weekends, taking you one step closer to perfection.
But let us face it, your reality would always end up looking like this:
Before we know it, we are at the mercy of procrastination.
So…why is it bad?
o understand the effects of procrastination, we only need to pounder on a simple question. What is the most valuable resource a human could own?
Wealth, real estate, sports cars… whilst all those things indeed possess a certain degree of value, they all take time to be obtained. Time for money to be accumulated and then exchange for those things.
Think about it, you need time to do everything, basically. There is infinite potential and possibilities fitted into every tick on the clock. Money can be gained if lost, houses can be repaired if damaged. But time? You only receive 24 hours in a day and one single lifetime. Not more, not less. Time is undoubtedly the most precious asset that we have.
Unluckily for us, everything with tremendous value eventually becomes a target for theft.
“Procrastination is the thief of time;
Year after year it steals, till all are fled”
Infinite potential lies in every tick on the clock. And procrastination robs you of that potential.
Like many astute thieves, procrastination is devilishly cunning. It does not do any damage upfront, leading you to loosen your guard and to indulge yourself in other things, like watching that TV show or do streaks on snapchat. Tick, tock, tick, tock. Procrastination always waits patiently in the shadows. Only until you realized there is only one left for you to write that essay, that is when procrastination claims victory.
Many may argue that despite procrastinating on things, they always manage to finish before the deadline. Some even came to enjoy the rush of adrenaline when doing things in the last minute. But remember that time is needed for everything to build up a good outcome. Like baking a dessert from scratch, building a house or losing 10 pounds. Rushing through the process will undoubtedly have detrimental effects on the quality of the result. Every minute you spend procrastinating on that task, you lose time to polish the outcome and to gain more things from it. That is how procrastination steals.
Now that all has been said, let’s get into how we will take matters into our own hands, and start dealing with procrastination.
What to do?
1. Break it down
Psychology research has revealed that our brain has the tendency to value immediate rewards more highly than future rewards. You are more likely to procrastinate on long projects, such as writing a 4- page science report, than to finishing your daily quick quiz for math. Because your brain sees no immediate benefit in doing the former task. So whenever you are procrastinating on a certain task, you may not have broken the assignment down to pieces, making it seem like a humongous workload of pure pain and misery, where in fact it might not be.
Instead of putting down “write my 1000 worded essay” on your to-do list, simply break it down and do “write 200 words of my essay” instead. The rewards are much more immediate, which is something your brain will certainly satisfy from. You will find yourself not dreading the task as much anymore, thus getting engaged in work and finishing it right away!
2. Don’t overthink, and don’t stress
Throughout million years of fighting for survival, fear has ensured humans to avoid harmful things and preserved us as a species. But it is not so helpful in the face of doing your homework or self-improvement in life. Our braincells commonly exaggerates the negative impacts of doing one task, ultimately giving way for us to drag it further into the future. So facing your fears is also essential in dealing with procrastination. Question yourself: why did I avoid this task in the first place? Is it because I am not capable? Is there someone I can seek help from, or something I can do to boost my skills and tackle it?
Interestingly, many procrastinators happen to be perfectionists. High standards and expectations are often applied to them, leading them to bear with the fear of an imaginary undesired outcome. The core to solving this issue is to be confident. Many issues are not actually issuing unless our brain made them to be.
3. Treat yourself!
In both school and life, there are often tasks that are just too boring and dry to do, even by breaking it down to bits as which is addressed in tip 1 does not help. This is the time when self-rewarding come into play. Give yourself a restful break after making some progress, whether it is nibbling at some snacks or read a few pages of that novel you have been intrigued in recently. Once your brain feels the satisfaction of completing bits and pieces of the task, it converts the positive feeling into fuel for more productivity!
4. The golden “2-minute rule”
“ An object at rest will remain at rest, and an object in motion will remain in motion. Unless both is applied with a force. ”
Perhaps Sir Issac Newton never would have thought his phenomenal scientific discoveries would apply to an article addressing how to meet your deadlines. But this law explains excellently why “the hardest part is to get started”. We all tend to remain the same state as we are in previously, we need to apply force of change to initial another task. But once we are engaged in the dragged-behind task, we will find ourselves giving output constantly and consistently, and even getting addicted to the task, not even wanting to stop. This is usually when we groan “IF ONLY I started on that EARLIER”.
One effective way is to start on the project for only 2 minutes and see how it goes. In this way, you will have a boost in motivation and even remain productive after the 2 minutes!
Over to you!
Even the best of us must battle with procrastination face to face in times of life, it is nothing to be ashamed of. The essential thing is to know your faults and improve from it.
Raise your chin, stand up tall, and have belief in your strength. You don’t need to be the slave of procrastination, because you are cleverer, and more powerful. Think of all the wonderful possibilities you will have if you have beaten procrastination to it. You will find yourself starting to overcome that barrier, slowly, bit by bit, maybe even quicker than you know it.
Bonus fun fact for those who read it this far
You may consider procrastination being only a modern issue, but humans have in fact been procrastinating for centuries. Even philosophers like Socrates and Aristotle back in times of ancient Greece have developed a word to describe this type of behavior: Akrasia. The state of doing something where you know you should be doing something else. Now you know that how big the problem procrastination is!
Author’s note:
This article is dedicated to all my Unihigh fellows whether in VCE or not in VCE, also to myself (a severe case) on how to deal with procrastination. The difficult and uncertain times we live in currently makes it exceptionally important to stay reminded on what to do and what not to do when ourselves become the sole source of motivation. Hope this will be helpful to you！Cheers!