How to Break Your Procrastination Habit By Daniel Jeffries

We all know the struggle of trying to finish a work project or study for an exam when there are thousands of ways to distract ourselves online.  A few years ago, I couldn’t work on an assignment for more than 10 minutes without checking my Facebook feed or playing a quick game of Starcraft.  Here are some techniques that I used to kick my procrastination habit:

• Keep your phone/remote control in your closet:  Think of things in terms of activation energy, or the amount of effort it takes to start a task.  When your cell phone or remote control is sitting right next to you, the activation energy required to send a text or turn on your TV is low, and these become are huge potential distractors.  Whenever you need to focus on work, try keeping your TV remote/cell phone in the back of your closet, while keeping your textbooks/work papers within arms-reach.  It’s a simple concept, yet I was amazed by how much easier it was to focus on work with this trick.

• Remove bookmarks for Netflix/Facebook/etc.:  Similar to the trick above, you’ll be way less tempted to compulsively check social media updates when it takes more than a single click to do so.  I keep links to these sites inside an obscure folder, which is in another obscure folder, and so on.  After a while, I was able to work for hours without even thinking about anything else.

                 

• Strive to reach a state of “flow”:  There are a ton of articles about how to reach “flow,” a state of peak concentration.  Different techniques work for different people, but I found meditation to be particularly helpful for this.  Being mindful of your breath for 5-10 minutes before studying/working can help tremendously, especially if your worries and anxieties are preventing you from reaching flow.

                                           

• Remember consistency; the hardest part is starting out:  It only takes a few weeks for an unpleasant task to become a habit.  The same logic applies for breaking an unwanted habit like procrastination.  Keep this in mind whenever you’re tempted to put off your studies.  Within a few weeks, prioritizing work over pleasure will become second nature.