Organization and willpower are great skills. However, even those with the organizational skills and the willpower to get through the day struggle with putting off tasks until the last minute—procrastination. Procrastination is a nasty habit, but it’s important to note that it is just that—a habit, not a personality trait. Meaning that, like every habit, it can be broken and replaced with a better habit. By breaking the habit of procrastination, you assure yourself that you will complete everything that you need to do without putting things to the last minute.

Every habit is divided into three categories: the trigger, the pattern, and the reward. In the case of most habits, people will advise you to eliminate the trigger. However, in the case of procrastination, the trigger is always stress. Because it is impossible to eliminate stress from your life, you need to change the pattern. In the case of procrastination, this means you need to replace not doing work with something else. The next time you find yourself procrastinating, try this simple trick: interrupt your procrastination by counting backwards from 5, and then force yourself to work for just five minutes. 80% of people continue to work after doing this. By counting backwards from 5, not only are you interrupting the habit, but you’re also forced to activate your prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain in charge of logic, reasoning, and comprehension. Because procrastination is a habit of avoiding work, not disliking the work, by forcing yourself to work for five minutes, you’ve stopped avoiding work, and you tend to continue working because you’ve passed the hardest point - the starting of the work. If you are interested in a more in-depth explanation of this concept, click this link.

Now, this strategy only works for 80% of people. Say that you are in the 20% of people that this doesn’t work for. What can you do to avoid procrastination? Here are two alternate tips that I have found to be incredibly effective.

Sometimes procrastination can arise because a big project is stressing you and you don’t know where to start. If this is the case, break bigger projects into smaller tasks. Then, complete each task, one at a time. While you could just plow through the project, by setting smaller tasks, your progress becomes quantifiable, i.e. you can see how you are progressing. Once you can see that you are progressing, you are less likely to procrastinate because you feel as though you are “on a roll.”

But what if the project size isn’t what is stressing you out? What if it’s simply that you’ve got too much time to complete the assignment? You may be thinking to yourself, “What is she talking about? Everything would be great if I had more time to complete everything!” While this is true in theory, too much time to complete an assignment results in you continuously thinking to yourself that you can “do it tomorrow.” Then all of a sudden, it’s a couple days to the assignment deadline and you realize you must complete the assignment; the painful guilt of not completing the assignment overwhelms you into working on it. This is a very stressful approach to completing work, and is easily solvable: impose time constraints. Imposing time constraints avoids the giant peak in your pain/stress levels (as seen in the above diagram). Instead, it keeps your pain at a stable level, because you are continuously taking action. In this way, you never experience the immense guilt driven procrastinatory tendencies, and you significantly decrease your stress. For more information on this technique, click here.

Throughout this series, you learned how to prevent your brain from struggling to remember things, learned how to timeblock your activities in an effective manner, learned techniques to gain willpower, and found out how to combat procrastination. With all these strategies, you officially know how to manage your time, energy, and most importantly, yourself. Thanks for reading everyone, and I wish you a wonderful summer!