How to Deal With Procrastination: My Experience

Procrastination is something I am almost certain that everyone experiences at some point in their university lives (or life in general), and for some of us, it happens on the daily. This can cause a bit of a tricky situation, where the inability to force ourselves to do an assignment only ends up causing a huge amount of stress in the long run. At the time, it's so difficult to convince yourself that you'll be suffering much more from the decisions you are making now. Even if you're aware of that fact, for some reason, your brain just doesn't want to process it and take action. So instead, we continue to sit and stare at a blank word document and waste a whole day doing absolutely nothing, out of guilt for doing anything but that. Therefore in this essay I want to discuss how to deal with procrastination.

Dealing with Procrastination 

Fair enough, it's going to be one of those days where you just can't produce a single sentence without checking your phone or staring out of the window. However, why should that mean that we waste a whole day doing absolutely nothing because of it? I don't know about you, but when I find myself procrastinating, I'll find small and useless things to do while just sitting in front of that piece of work. For some reason, I feel guilty if I step away from my laptop screen and do something a little more productive, because then I'm no longer paying any attention to the assignment that should be in front of me. So as a result, I just end up wasting a whole day sat in front of my laptop screen, doing absolutely nothing, but still manage to feel a sense of achievement at the fact that I 'tried', when in actual fact, I just wasted a day.

That's where learning how to deal with procrastination can really come in handy. Having the ability to notice when you're procrastinating is important. But to then pull yourself away from the guilt you feel by not doing your work and to then distract your mind by doing something else instead, is the real game changer.

It's about learning to pull yourself away from that blank word document and teach your mind that it's okay to step away if you're incapable of being productive. It's okay to take a couple of hours off, or even a whole day, because as a result, you'll be allowing yourself to do something more productive with that time. That time away may even provide you with a little motivation to sit down and get a few paragraphs written over a few days. Or it may even give you enough motivation to get the whole thing finished way before the deadline date and escape all that last-minute stress.

Conclusion

Procrastination can be incredibly difficult because it consumes you with guilt, which leads to frustration, which ends up adding to the procrastination you are already experiencing. Learning to accept you're having an off day is the key to overcoming it.Learning to appreciate writing a few sentences as a success when you're really struggling, is the best way to remove the guilt and to keep on going. Learning to allow yourself some time away from those deadlines to refresh your mind, can really help avoid those few days of stress as you reach a final deadline and still have a tonne of the assignment left to complete.