7 Tried and Tested Secrets to Beat Procrastination

Ah, procrastination. When you still have plenty of time left until the deadline, so you put that assignment off for later. But before you know it, you are furiously ripping through your work; desperate to get it done even a minute before it’s due. 

Sound familiar? 

From being in school, I found the most effective ways to punch procrastination in the gut and complete assignments.  

As it turns out, when you know how to do something, it becomes easy to come up with a game plan and win in the end. 

Is It Procrastination, or something else?

You know what they say: recognizing the problem is half of the solution. But sometimes, procrastination isn’t the real problem. You aren’t necessarily guilty every time you put something off. 

Sometimes, there’s genuinely too much to do, and you become burnt out. This is a whole other issue for which I recommend you seek professional help for. Burnout is no small thing, take care of yourself before everything else!

With that said, you might be thinking, “Okay, so how do I recognize it?”. Well, there are a few questions you can ask yourself to find out: 

1. What’s my reason for putting it off? 

Again, not all delaying is procrastinating. Sometimes you simply cannot work on something. That’s okay too! For example, if you have a shift at work now, you obviously can’t work on your essay. 

If you’re delaying your work for a legitimate reason like soccer practice, you could just have a full schedule at the moment. Try moving things around

On the other hand, if your reason is something more like ‘I don’t know enough yet to start’, that’s procrastinating.  

Unless you are on the verge of fainting or something, you have enough energy to at least start. 

2. How often am I putting work off? 

It’s one thing to forget the odd assignment here and there. It is a completely different story if you are actively choosing to do something else. 

When you’re putting off more of your work than you should for no good reason, that’s procrastination. By putting off assignments regularly, you’ve developed a habit of it.

If you’re missing assignments because you’re just forgetful, try using a calendar or agenda to help yourself out.  

Nothing is worse than knowing how to do something but forgetting to do it! 

3. How badly am I drowning in work? 

This is the real reason you are here, right? This is the stage when most people feel overwhelmed and want to overcome this habit. 

If you have felt like life isn’t so bad for a while, and suddenly it’s as if the entire world has decided to stand on your shoulders, yeah… that’s too much at once. 

While it may feel fine at the start, it won’t feel fine the day all your work is due. It’ll feel something more like shaking, sweating, anxiety attacks… you get the picture. 

You’ve also likely been procrastinating if you never really know where all this work came from. Others seem to be doing fine while you’ve got 10 assignments on your hands at once. 

If you constantly feel like there’s too much, ask yourself if you’re maybe overdoing it. Perhaps you can take an extracurricular off your plate or get help from a tutor. 

Okay, So I Procrastinate. Now What? 

While it may seem impossible to stop now, you must know deep down that you can do this. After all, you are here reading this post, right?  

Well my little Jedi, you should be glad to know that you shouldn’t fear! There are ways to break the habit, and I have first-hand experience of them working. 

Here I have compiled a list of the six most effective strategies for overcoming the habit, and I still use them today. Bon appétit: 

1. The 5-Minute Magic Trick/The 5-Minute Rule 

Ok, so it’s not really magic, it’s science! But it still deserves its spot as first on this list. If you stick to it, it works miracles. 

According to this study, the way it works is by making the commitment to a task seem less daunting. Think about it, when you know you’re going to take an hour on something, that feels like a big commitment to something you don’t want to do. If you say you only have to do five minutes, it carries less pressure with it.

The process for this is simple enough: 

1. Set a timer for five minutes. 
2. Swear on all that is holy that you will work diligently for those five minutes. 
3. Work diligently for five minutes. 
4. If, when your timer goes off, this work still feels like the end of the world, you don’t have to do it. Work on something else and come back to it later to try again. 

If all goes well, by the time you make it to step 4, you’ll think something along the lines of: “Let me finish this sentence, then I’ll stop”, and proceed to spend the next 40 minutes finishing your assignment without even realizing it. 

This works by taking pressure off the work and making it feel like just a small thing you’re about to do. This way, you’re open to spending a few minutes on it. Once you’re in the swing of things, it’ll be harder to pull yourself away from what you’re doing. 

When you feel like you aren’t doing anything, it suddenly becomes easy to do everything.

2. DO NOT Get Yourself Alone 

You might be thinking, “Shouldn’t I be sitting alone in a quiet place?”, well… yes and no. 

You should be far away from distracting people, like friends for example, but not all people. Have some people around can be effective for overcoming procrastination.  

Think of it this way: if you are completely by yourself, it’s easy to pull out tiktok. On the other hand, if you’re in a room full of people, it can feel like you’re exposing yourself by being the only one not doing something productive. 

What I’m saying is, make yourself feel awkward for doing something not work-related. If you’ll be frowned upon for not working somewhere, go there. 

**It’s important to note that if you ever feel uncomfortable or unsafe somewhere, remove yourself from the situation. Safety first, amigos!**

I hate to be that person, but technology is a huge distraction, and a major source for procrastination. And that’s just because it’s too easily accessible. 

I don’t blame anyone, who would want to learn about the pythagorean theorem when they have the gateway to all human knowledge in their hands?  

Putting your phone away, or at least on a screen limit, while you work can be extremely beneficial, even if you know how to un-limit it. Hopefully, seeing the no-no banner will remind you that you’re trying to work right now. 

If you need a laptop or computer to do your work, put a limit on that too. Restrict yourself to websites that will have all the information you’ll need, like Britannica, SparkNotes, or GoogleScholar. Do internal searches within the websites instead of in a new tab as well. 

And don’t forget that textbooks exist too, it’s much harder to go down a dark rabbit hole in a book.

Bonus Tip!:
Try to stay away from all radio and TV. People talking about interesting topics are hard to ignore, especially while trying to get past procrastination. 

However, if you’re the kind of person that absolutely needs music to work, that might be the only exception. I would try to stay away from songs you’re familiar with though. If you know the whole song word-for-word, you’ll end up focusing more on the music, and less on your work 

4. The 2-Minute Rule 

I’ll admit: I’ve used this method hundreds of times. It’s particularly helpful with those long, boring assignments, or chores, that I simply don’t want to do. 

Here’s how it works: Tell yourself you are not going to work on your presentation right now, you’re not even going to sit down! You’re just going to print and cut out the diagrams.

Okay that was easy. Now, you’re still not going to do work, just find a couple facts to add. Still, you’re not working, you’re just going to quickly jot down the dates now that you found facts, oh yeah, you’ll need citations for that. You’re still not working though. 

You get the idea? 

By making your important work feel like busy work, it’ll become increasingly more difficult to ignore the tiny things that only take a second. Eventually, the completed assignment will eventually sneak up on you. Ideally, you’ll have sat down to do it properly without even realizing it. Bye bye, procrastination!

5. The Modified Incentive 

So we’ve all seen the gummy bear on the textbook thing, but it’s just so easy to simply… eat the bears before you get there.  

Not to mention, having something so tempting dangling in front of your eyes while you try to focus on the French Revolution is near to impossible. 

Instead, ask a friend or family member if they’re willing to help you overcome your procrastination. 

Once you have an assistant, ask them to simply keep you away from the prize or incentive that you have placed in their trustworthy hands. Maybe you agreed to watch a movie together if you finish this much work, or you get a donut if you make it through that chapter.  

Let’s just hope they won’t eat your donut before you finish. 

I find that having someone there to hold you accountable is super helpful. It has a similar principle to the ‘room full of people’ I explained before. 

Your assistant will know how long you have been “working” and if you only got a couple of sentences done in two hours, that’s humbling. This gives you that nudge that you might need to work through the assignment to get your donut, and feel good about it. 

6. “You’ll get a stomachache if you swallow it like that.”

Anyone else want chocolate now? No? Just me? Okay. 

Regardless, taking smaller bites of your chocolate always makes it easier to eat, so why wouldn’t breaking down your work into smaller chunks not make it easier to finish? 

Basically, don’t do it all now. Yes, you read that right; beat procrastination by putting off your work.  

When you get an assignment, you get the deadline for it, right? Well, use it! The first thing you do upon getting work assigned shouldn’t be putting it in your bag, it should be putting it in a planner or calendar of sorts.  

Planning out how you want to get your work done right from the start is the best way to go about this. If you get two weeks to write a report, plan on researching in the first week, and writing in the second week. 

To go even further, break it down into the days of the week and decide to research part one on Monday, two on Tuesday, three on Wednesday, and so on. Depending on how many sections of the assignment there are, you could even end up with days where you don’t have to do anything for it! 

The only thing to make sure of, is that you actually do the work when you plan to. 

To recap this point, don’t eat an entire chocolate bar in one mouthful. Homework looks a lot more appetizing if you break it down into manageable pieces. 

7. The Notebook 

I don’t mean the movie here, although it’s a pretty good watch. What I mean is to keep a notebook on you at all times. 

When you have a project to work on, chances are you will think about it, and you might get a little idea for it. Write it down. Seriously, what do you have to lose?  

You can keep a pen and notepad in your pocket, an app on your phone, or use a voice recorder/talk-to-type feature. They all get you the same result: a recorded idea. 

If you go to the park and hear a couple talking politics, you might get a perspective you didn’t see before, you could potentially use that as an argument or counterargument in your essay.  

Or maybe you suddenly get the brilliant idea to present your Australia Colonization project with hand-made puppets and poster board…  

Okay, that might not have been my brightest idea, but it did get me the grade! 

My point is you don’t always remember everything you think. Ideas are bound to get lost, and then you’ll have an excuse for not starting: no ideas. Well, now you have a notebook full of ideas saved for when you don’t know where to start. 

In Summary… 

Now that you know how to identify procrastination and learned some ways to help, it’s time to get your game plan going. 

Whether you decide to implement one or all of my tips, remember that doing something is always better than nothing.

Just by showing up, you’ve shown that you want to make a change in your work-ethic, and kudos to you for that! I hope that these tips help you complete your work and ultimately feel less stressed out. 

What should I write about next? Let me know in the comments what the next post topic should be about!

Well, that’s all from me, adios for now!

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