This is the solution to procrastination I finally settled on during my senior year of college, when I was deepest in its throes. My biggest hurdle was that I no longer cared about the work, and rather than try to fight the apathy, I embraced it. I said to myself, the reason I don’t want to work on this lab report is because it’s a stupid assignment and I don’t care about it, so what sense does it make trying to force myself to work on it for hours and hours? Instead, I think it’s worth, at most, 4 hours of my time, and it’s due at 1:30 on Tuesday afternoon, so I will purposefully not start it until 9:30 Tuesday morning, and—and this was the crucial step—not feel in the least bad about the fact that I haven’t started it yet up until that point. And whaddaya know, I still graduated Phi Beta Kappa.
Is this an ideal long-term solution? Presumably not, though maybe for some people. And it wouldn’t work on a task that legitimately required a hundred hours to complete. But it was a great solution for me in that context, when the desirable end-goal of the diploma was in sight, and I just needed to keep handing in my homework long enough to get there.
This is the solution to procrastination I finally settled on during my senior year of college, when I was deepest in its throes. My biggest hurdle was that I no longer cared about the work, and rather than try to fight the apathy, I embraced it. I said to myself, the reason I don’t want to work on this lab report is because it’s a stupid assignment and I don’t care about it, so what sense does it make trying to force myself to work on it for hours and hours? Instead, I think it’s worth, at most, 4 hours of my time, and it’s due at 1:30 on Tuesday afternoon, so I will purposefully not start it until 9:30 Tuesday morning, and—and this was the crucial step—not feel in the least bad about the fact that I haven’t started it yet up until that point. And whaddaya know, I still graduated Phi Beta Kappa.
Is this an ideal long-term solution? Presumably not, though maybe for some people. And it wouldn’t work on a task that legitimately required a hundred hours to complete. But it was a great solution for me in that context, when the desirable end-goal of the diploma was in sight, and I just needed to keep handing in my homework long enough to get there.