Bradley's Blog

Whether you are currently in middle school, high school, or attending college, I bet you never hear anyone say they are excited to write an entire essay in one night. No one is ever happy with dealing with the stress of writing a report, creating a presentation, or desperately trying to learn a unit’s worth of material all in one night. Despite all the pain working on assignments at the last minute causes, many students believe there is no other better way of going about it. Well, I am here to say that I am currently a college student that battles procrastination in my academic career. I know what it is like to spend hours working on something that could have been such an easy process if I didn’t procrastinate. From all my years in school, I have always hated the feeling of procrastination and would always be angry whenever I experienced the stress of trying to meet a deadline. I know many students out there feel the same, and I have lots of advice about increasing your overall productivity during the week. If you apply my advice below, even if you’re not currently a student, I guarantee you will see a severe decline in the number of times you procrastinate your work.

Where do I start?

The first important thing to remember when avoiding procrastination is that “not procrastinating” is more than just taking the time to sit down and work. Many students often misinterpret where the difficulty stems from when avoiding procrastination. While completing the work in advance is essential, finding the will and motivation to accomplish your goals is what most students fail at when trying to be responsible. It is always difficult to find willpower and motivation if the task will take me multiple hours or if the actual work seems complicated and intimidating. The best way to avoid these problems is by making the conditions for yourself as favorable as possible.

How do I Give Myself the Courage to Start Working?

My first recommendation is to use a planner. I have used a planner since elementary school, and now that I am in college, I can see the significant role planners have played in my productivity. With my current schedule, I often have many assignments and mini-projects due at the end of each week. Along with the actual work, extracurricular activities, spending time with friends, extended work schedules, and getting enough sleep are obstacles when trying to avoid procrastination. There have been countless weeks where it feels like so many things need to be completed that the stress and anxiety of thinking about it make me want to shut down and procrastinate. However, that is where the planner is most effective. Taking the time to write out everything I need to do has helped me organize all of my thoughts in a way that is easy to read. 

What is The Best Way to Use a Planner?

When writing in a planner, I highly recommend writing a plan for yourself every Sunday. Focus on setting personal deadlines for yourself about when you want to complete specific assignments. One way to think about the writing process in a planner is that you take a couple of minutes each day to help your future self drastically. Creating a plan for yourself in the future is so effective because you already took everything from that week into consideration, and now all you do is follow the plan written out by your past self. When making a plan, being realistic and honest with yourself is essential. For example, if you know that you will be busy with activities on Wednesday then don’t plan to complete lots of homework that day. Plan around it instead. If you have a book report due on Friday, but will be busy with activities on Thursday, plan to give yourself time earlier in the week so you don’t feel panicked and exhausted writing the report later in the week. While the plan helps you focus, it usually isn’t perfect. An important thing to note about any work schedule is that it can cause more harm than good if you force yourself to commit to it at all costs.

How do I Plan for The Week Effectively?

There will always be times when something unexpected can present itself during the week.  These are impossible to foresee when creating a plan for that specific week. When these situations arise, it is crucial to be able to let yourself off the hook. For example, on Tuesday, something that happened in the day physically drained you, but you originally wrote in the plan to complete three assignments due on Friday. In this situation, it would be best to let yourself off the hook and instead adjust your weekly plan. I would do this by writing myself a new plan for Wednesday. The new schedule would accommodate that some of the work I originally planned to complete on Tuesday needs to be pushed off until Wednesday. The biggest mistake you can make is forcing yourself to work when you are mentally or physically exhausted. You won’t learn anything effectively and will put yourself at risk of being mentally drained the following day. I understand that no matter what happens, there will always be times when you are forced to work when you have low energy, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing you can do to help yourself get around those hard times. The worst thing you can do in these situations makes yourself tough it out and go through with the plan when it is unnecessary to meet a given deadline. I speak from experience because I have tried to push myself when I am tired to avoid procrastinating. What usually ended up happening is that I only managed to complete two hours’ worth of work, it took me longer to complete the task than it would have if I had allowed myself to rest, and I unknowingly drained myself for the next day’s work as well. 

What are some Helpful Tips to Know When Making the Plan?

As for the plan creation process, I have several tips for adequately managing a busy workload. First, I recommend writing out all the assignments due from Monday until Sunday at 11:59pm. Once you have all the homework written out, ensure that you organize them by class and make it clear what day and time each one is due. After all this information is written down, it is time to decide when you want to work on each assignment. When determining the ideal order to work on homework, I recommend estimating how long you think each task will take to finish. For example, a weekly discussion post due on Friday could take up to twenty minutes, and a four-page essay would most likely take a maximum of four hours. Now after reading that, you may be thinking, “What? That’s ridiculous. I could complete both of those assignments in half the time”. That is probably true, but when predicting how long something will take, it is always better to assume it will take longer than expected when trying to avoid procrastination. If you believe that a task will take longer than expected, then it will encourage you to want to start working on it ahead of time. The best part about doing it this way is that you almost always complete the work earlier than the maximum amount of time you initially set for yourself. Another bonus is that I usually receive an internal feeling of accomplishment whenever I complete something quicker than expected, encouraging me to keep working ahead. 

Now that you have finished writing out the deadlines and estimated completion times, it is time to decide which assignments to work on each day. My general rule is to start working on something at least two days before it is due. However, I only recommend doing this for assignments that will take less than 30 minutes to complete, and I consider this the bare minimum mentally. If you want to work towards being the best anti-procrastination version of yourself, try to meet all these small assignments as early in the week as possible. For example, if I had three discussion posts, each would take 20 minutes to complete, due by Friday at 11:59 pm, I would consider any submission later than Tuesday at 11:59 pm to give in to procrastination. Furthermore, if you have an assignment that is bound to take at least an hour, the bare minimum to avoid procrastinating would be to plan to start working at least three days before it is due. Another helpful tip that is important to know is that if an assignment takes multiple hours, never plan to complete it all in one sitting. 

Throughout my schooling, I often forced myself to complete hours’ worth of reading, studying, or writing in one sitting. If you want to stop procrastinating, you must be able to break away from this mentality and here is the main reason why. One time in high school, I planned to annotate one hundred and fifty pages of a book in a single day because my teacher would be checking the following day. Rather than spacing out the work over the past week by having myself annotate around forty pages a day, I decided to complete all this work in one sitting on a Thursday evening. That was a massive mistake because I burned myself out from working multiple hours on it. I remember once I was halfway done with annotating, I could feel inside myself that I was retaining little to none of the information, and I was thinking about wanting to be done. The worst part was that it wasn’t the only assignment I had to complete by Friday. There was math homework that I had to work on afterward, and it took a long time to complete because my brain felt fried from all the annotations I made for my English class. Overall, planning to complete extensive assignments in one sitting is a recipe for disaster. If you try to complete it in a single sitting early in the week, you will mentally burn out for the next couple of days. If you wait until the end of the week to complete it, then you have ultimately failed in terms of not procrastinating. Spacing large assignments alongside the easy work makes the most significant difference when wanting to avoid procrastination and work efficiently. You will be most productive when you space out the work because you save energy, work faster, and retain information better when you don’t feel stressed from approaching due dates.

What Should I Do Going Forward? 

Now that you know what to look for when avoiding procrastination, the next step you should take is to acquire a quality planner. When choosing a planner, I would recommend the Blue Sky Planning Calendar. I currently use this planner, and the main reason I believe this is the best one is because it provides a large amount of space to write. In middle school, many of the planners I used were small, making it difficult to use when I had many assignments that I needed to write out. The Blue Sky Planning Calendar is excellent when you need a lot of space. In addition, it is a tall and thin planner that does not take up much room in a backpack. If you are determined to take the first step in reducing procrastination, click here to order the Blue Sky

Planning Calendar.