A Tip From Your Fellow Procrastinators

Everyone’s told you to be more efficient. If you do it now, you won’t have to do it later. You know this…but those YouTube shorts are just so captivating, your bed is so soft, and you’re just waiting until the time’s a whole number before standing up and doing work.

You open up YouTube, and the clock ticks in the background.

Just one more video…

And it’s 8:01. You’ve passed another time that’s a whole number. At 8:15, you’re in the middle of a video, so you can’t pause now; at 8:30, you’re too distracted to get up on time… soon, it’s 9:00. Where has the time gone?

We may have procrastinated on this article, but we still got it done before the last minute! We’re not claiming to bring about any miracles or fix your sleep schedule (at this point, only you can do that); we’re here to provide some tips and tricks (collected from some BISV students) on how to motivate yourself to study and minimize your procrastination.

(1) Try finding a friend or a family member to work in the room with you while you do your task  (they don’t have to be doing the same thing as you). If you’re unable to get a friend in the same physical room as you, calling a friend may work as well! The slight pressure from their presence could provide the motivation you need to get your work done.

(2) Why be a couch potato when you can be a freshly dug-up potato that has come in contact with grass within the past decade? Change your setting! Although you may be a couch potato at your desk, it is important to change scenery sometimes, no matter how comfortable that chair may be. Have a mental block? Well, maybe moving around will magically clear your doubts. Weird, right? But it works! The clutter in your not-so-clean room may be causing unnecessary stress, and your brain probably just needs room to breathe. 

(3) Set yourself an end time for each task! If you like music, you can try completing one task per song (this works especially well when you’re trying to do fast, menial tasks such as cleaning). Setting a time limit allows you to focus on getting your tasks done instead of getting them done perfectly; while perfection is desired, some assignments don’t have to be “final draft” ready, aesthetically perfect, and complete with all possible information. For the procrastinators who are motivated by Last Minute Panic™ right before something is due, setting an earlier due date can artificially create a similar situation but with less on the line (your math grade will thank you).

(4) Do you ever come home with that feeling of complete despair after realizing the stacks of homework that have been dumped onto your head? Declaring a four-hour study period, you wearily walk to your room, saddened by the copious amounts of learning your brain must undergo for your 12 tests tomorrow. Realistically speaking, you’ll go home, walk to your room, procrastinate until 12, and then start manically doing your work. Our best way to avoid this is by splitting your four-hour-long work into a realistic period where you can get work done. We often find ourselves working for 30-minute periods, incorporating 5-minute breaks after each period ends, and feeling accomplished at the end of the day. From there, you can enjoy the best of both worlds: YouTube Shorts and getting work done.

Even when your mandatory work may seem impossible to complete, you’ve got to do it somehow (and we hope we’ve helped a little when you do get started). We sympathize with your position and hope to not see you on a Google Doc at 2 am. Please do your best to avoid Hofstadter’s Law!

The Procrastinator Duo, out.