(Disclaimer: This post is to be used in emergency scenarios only. Procrastination is a very bad way to get work done.)
Hi, guys. I have a confession to make. My name is Cole Carder, I’m 22, and I am a serial procrastinator. Procrastination is not something I’m proud of. Before college, I was always kind of lucky. School came easily to me and I would often wait to do projects until the last minute but was still able to receive good grades throughout. I didn’t start to learn the danger of procrastination until I started college.
I’m not saying procrastination is unavoidable. There are a ton of students that aren’t like me, and stay ahead of their school work. However, between jobs, school, and extracurriculars, the case for a lot of students is the same as mine. Procrastinating until the last minute and having a lot of work to finish in a short amount of time. While I’ve tried to be better at starting work early and follow my own advice from the earlier blog post about getting motivated to work, sometimes I still find myself back down the rabbit hole of procrastination.
Obviously not procrastinating is the best method, but once you’re almost out of time to finish a project, there’s no turning back the clock, and the work still needs to be done. It’s time to get working the only way we procrastinators know; quickly. Getting a lot of work done fast isn’t easy, but it’s possible in a pinch.
The first thing you should do to start the day when you have work to get done is to get anything that you absolutely have to do that day out of the way. If you don’t have something to eat around the house go get it. Once you start working, you don’t want to be pulled away from working for long periods. Once the essential tasks are out of the way, it’s time to figure out how much work you need to get done. Break the work done into tasks that need to be completed by a certain time or day. This gives you an idea of how much work you need to get done in a set amount of time.
So doing a lot of work in a short time obviously isn’t fun. Do you know what else isn’t fun? Doing the laundry. Let’s be honest, if you’re the type of person who procrastinates schoolwork, you’re probably the type of person who procrastinates laundry. On days when I’m getting schoolwork done after procrastinating, I decide the day is kind of a wash, to begin with, because I’m going to be working all day. I use doing the laundry as a way to take breaks and do something easy that lets my brain rest. Since a cycle of laundry also takes about an hour, I use the laundry cycles to set goals. For example, if I have multiple papers or essays to write, I want to be able to finish 1 paper per cycle or something of that nature.
Procrastination is bad, and none of us should do it, but if you find yourself in my position, I hope this post will help make getting the work done a little less terrible. Thanks for reading along. How will you work to try and avoid procrastination in the future?
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