Time Strategies... and my Lacktherof

One of my greatest flaws has always been time management. Back in high school and before, one of my biggest problems was underestimating the amount of time something would take. Throw in a big pile of procrastination and you get yourself a lot of late assignments. Nowadays, I am usually a lot better at estimating the time I will need to put forward to complete a task, but I am still plagued by terrible procrastination. For this assignment, I chose to read 2 articles on ways to combat procrastination - How to Beat Procrastination by Caroline Webb and 4 Questions to Help You Overcome Procrastination by Peter Banerjea.

Both of the articles had very similar information - the general idea to combat procrastination is simply a thought process. My main takeaway is where both articles align, and I feel motivation to tackle other tasks when I try these. Firstly is to consider the negative effects of procrastinating a task. I'm bad at this: I don't ever really consider the side effects of procrastination, especially when a task doesn't have a definite deadline. Secondly is to break large tasks up into smaller tasks. I'm usually pretty good at this, but I generally do this step too late anyway. Thirdly is to remove the smaller less important tasks from the day: I'm pretty bad at this. I like to do a small number of things and tell myself I've had a productive day and everything is fine, when in fact I should have worked on bigger tasks. Finally, the method that I use most frequently and I think I'm pretty good at, is actually obligating yourself to complete a task by a deadline. I discovered that I was excellent at getting homework done on time if I just found someone to do it with: we could get each other to start on time and stay on task. Similarly, when I have a big task that I've been putting off, I like to tell someone I see often that I will complete it by a certain day. In a way, this still feels like procrastinating, because I still wait till the end of the "deadline" to do the task, but by setting the deadline myself, I accelerate the process. Some of these steps I knew and use frequently, some of them I didn't know or didn't use even if I did know. I have bookmarked the pages in hopes that they will help in the future - I have a lot of tasks I've been putting off and a lot of free time this week.



Image Information
(Procrastination Flowchart - Flickr)