Your deadline is closing in fast, and yet somehow Netflix is still on. Even cleaning your toilet seems more appealing than finishing that dreaded paper for college. Procrastination plagues nearly all students at some point, but there are ways to avoid avoiding work.
“When you’re so engrossed in Instagram while you’re studying that you’ve got to rewind five minutes of Netflix.” That’s what procrastination is.
At least that’s if you go by one German university student’s definition on a social media platform, presumably posted when they should have been working on something else. Constantly putting off things you should be doing is pervasive in the halls of academia. But when does procrastination really become a problem for students, and how can they stop it?
One way to avoid coming under time pressure by having dawdled too long is to try to trick yourself. “Students can mark the deadline in their calendar under an earlier date,” suggests Martin Krengel, a time-management expert and author.
Collective work and study can also help. If you regularly get together with fellow students and check on each other’s progress, you’re hardly in a position to drag your feet. “As an incentive, the one who doesn’t meet his or her personal goals then treats the others to coffee or something,” Krengel says.
If you’re easily distracted by YouTube, Netflix and social media, you should “simply pull the plug, switch off the internet and put your phone away,” Krengel advises. Apps that block distracting messages or user-selected websites for a certain time period can help as well.
An additional measure for extreme procrastinators is to delete all of the social media apps on your mobile phone during the working week. So starting on Monday morning, your only contact with the outside world is via the messaging app Messenger.
The potential distractions offline are at least as plentiful as those online, including things like cleaning up your flat, doing the weekly shop or getting together with friends.
“If you want to dodge a task or decision, you’ll always find an alternative activity,” remarks Catrin Grobbin, a university research fellow in psychology whose focus is on procrastination. It’s important, she says, to determine why you put things off and then devise tailor-made countermeasures.
Changing habits seldom succeeds overnight, though. To establish new ones, she says you must firmly decide to change your ways, have a good plan on how to do it and sufficient time to break in the new habits.
It’s important that students create a solid framework for their university activities. “Each day you should set a precise time, definite time span and specific place for the next step in your work,” recommends psychotherapist Julia Haferkamp, who works at a walk-in university “procrastination clinic.”
Students often make the mistake of planning to do too much in too little time. “The 50-per-cent rule can help in these cases,” says Haferkamp. “You should do 50 per cent of what you had originally planned. This protects you from disappointment and can give you a sense of accomplishment.”
A task that’s very abstract and has to do with homework or an examination can arouse negative emotions and be hard to get motivated for. But you can usually plough ahead if you simply get started. Krengel suggests the 10-minute trick: “You spend just 10 minutes on a small task,” he says, for example write 200 words, or read half a chapter of a book and summarise it in a mind map.
The advantage of this method, he says, is that your brain is activated and stays preoccupied with the task after the 10 minutes are up, making it easier for you to devote more time to it. The goal is to accumulate positive feelings of having accomplished something, thereby making the task more palatable. – dpa
