PROCRASTINATION 2

Summary for Tactical Motivation: Procrastination Avoidance made Practical

Procrastination avoidance made Practical:

NOTE: This is a verbatim transcript from the video. More resources are available from the Student Achievement Series [link]

Procrastination affects anywhere from 50 to 70% of students to such a degree that they themselves agree that they have lost marks as a result. And yet there is no mystery here. For the vast majority of students, procrastination is simple pain avoidance. If you touch a hot burner on a stove, it hurts! You yank your hand back. If you crack open your textbook and the first thought through your head has nothing to do with what is in the text, but instead is something like I hate stats or oh man I am so far behind or geez this stuff is so boring, there arent even any pictures, how do they expect me to learn without pictures. this will only encourage procrastination.

Feeling overwhelmed, bored or intimidated by the material are all unpleasant emotions. Opened the book, had the thought, experienced the pain! Solution: walk away. The first step in dealing with procrastination is not get too caught up in trying to figure it out, to find some deep reason as to why you are procrastinating. This is probably just another more subtle version of procrastination. You are unlikely to find any deeper reason for procrastination other than boredom, intimidation, and feeling overwhelmed.

The second step is to recognize when you are procrastinating. This is not as easy as it sounds because for most students procrastination can be a very subtle phenomena. All you need is a word flash statistics and suddenly you are mopping the floor, cleaning the kitchen and organizing your CDs. Thankfully, usually students have particular distraction tactics that they use and knowing what your personal distraction tactic is can help. Many students are cleaners or organizers. They spend all their time organizing getting ready to study. For example, they might sharpen all their pencils or clear their desk to make sure that they have a nice work space. Most of the time, this is just pure procrastination though. Many others use their computer to procrastinate. They surf the web, they play games and usually their favorite game is solitaire. Others are nappers or snoozaholics. You know you are a snoozaholic if you use that snooze button more than 3 times because you know that you cant be getting any quality sleep from only none minutes. Whatever your personal procrastination or distraction technique is, pay attention to it. If it looks like it is procrastination, and if it sounds like procrastination, and behaves like procrastination, it probably is procrastination.

The third step is to pay attention to your language and that is what are you saying to yourself. You can be psyching yourself up for doing the task or psyching yourself out of doing it. If the first thought through your hear is I hate statistics thats not going to help in doing the statistics. The fourth step, of course, is to just get started. For most students, once they get started, the rest is easy. A good strategy to get started is called the five minute technique. With this technique you make a deal with yourself and the deal is you will just do five minutes of the dreaded task because no matter how boring, overwhelming or intimidating it is, you can usually handle it for five minutes. And spend the next five minutes actually doing the task. Really doing the task, not sharpening your pencil, getting ready to do it but actually working on the task at hand. And dont try to fool yourself; adjusting the front size and the margins thats still procrastination. If at the end of the five minutes, you want to stop and take a break; that is fine. But you will probably find that the momentum that you have from the first five minutes will carry you through the entire task.

I hope this helps. Of course procrastination, time management and motivation all fit together so you might want to watch some of the other videos in this series.

Duration : 0:3:58

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