Remember when you had an exam that you have to study for, I used to sleep thinking of what will I do next day, preparing lots of stuff to memorize, and making plans of the day. I wake up determining to start just after having coffee and some breakfast, then I head to start but I think that I should maybe put some kind of a schedule at the beginning to arrange what I will do during the day for which I spend around half an hour making. After that I feel tired so I think that some juice will help, and when I finish it I start for about 5 minutes only and I feel bored. So, I watch TV a little bit. I’m hungry again, or I have to make a phone call, or I should go to a friend to study together, and so on for the whole day until the day ends without studying anything!!!
Sorry for the long introduction, but how many of you do this when having something important to do?? This is called procrastination and we all tend to do when we have a task and it has many reasons like fear of failure.
In order to stop procrastination, we need to understand why it happens first place. There are many reasons as mentioned above but I will handle two broad reasons and how to overcome them.
• Unpleasant task: this is when you have to do something not appealing to you like home chores or calling someone you don’t like.
Solutions:
- Make your own rewards: set a goal and assign yourself a reward when you achieve it. The reward can be anything you love like chocolate, watching TV, or anything practically.
- Ask someone else to check up on you: and it should be someone you respect or you don’t want to fail like a friend or a family member.
- Identify the unpleasant consequences of NOT doing the task: Picture the misery you will feel and the material consequences like having to go through the same task again or not being able to reach certain level in work or study. Also, it might help if you think of joy resulting from achieving that task.
• Overwhelming task: If you have a huge book that you need to study or this big presentation you need to get ready for, we fear the responsibility and tend to procrastinate.
Solutions:
- Break the project to smaller tasks: this will help you to deal with small parts that you can manage more and end quickly. Also when you finish every task you will feel more accomplished and close to the final goal.
- Start with easy quick tasks: Even it is not the logical sequence of the project, doing something quick and easy will encourage you more to complete the project.
We are all guilty of procrastination at some point but we have to overcome this problem to get further and succeed in school or real life. Please share what you do to get rid o
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