Numerous students and workers don’t know how to stop procrastinating and to make themselves work effectively. We prepared a short but useful tip list for such situations.
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1.Make Your Deadline Closer for Yourself
If you don’t think any task to be urgent, it’s easy for you to delay it. No, really, if you’ve got a month to finish your job, there is no reason to be in a hurry, it’s better to go for something more pleasant. But such thoughts are dangerous, as a rule. Time passes fast, and this makes a threat of sleepless night before the deadline real.
The advice is easy: put a deadline to an earlier day at your personal working schedule.
Instead of giving yourself the whole month to make some work, devote a week to it. Even if a week will not be enough, it will be much time to post-process a task, to finalize important small details which often show up at the very last moment.
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2. Put Your Personal Deadline
People are all different. Basing on your own experience you can create the best plan to perform your task, without looking onto others.
There can be noticed four categories of people according to their performance:
- Organizers – they make work using the other people and their abilities;
- Priority determiners – they are concentrated on the main idea;
- Visuals – they never lose things going on from their sight;
- Planners – they can put even small details to order.
Instead of saying: “I’ve got to finish the job till (insert) day”, just focus on the task totally. You can dive into a single project with all your energy, or you can complete its parts while doing something else at the same time. The point is to determine what is the best solution personally for you.
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3. Put an Achievable Goal
Everyone wants to make work better and faster. Yet sometimes, it is difficult to make one first step, to overcome the feeling that you’ll have to move a mountain. Doubts appear: is there a reason to even start doing something, if the task is difficult, and, maybe, impossible?
Try dividing the task into several small but easy to complete stages. Imagine that you’ve got to work every 10 minutes. You’ll have to think what could you do during this time. Maybe, to think out some essay topics. To write a part of text. To correct things that you’ve written before.
This advice is fine once you can’t make yourself start working, which means you delay the task deadline further and further. Start from a small 10-minute job. If you’ll like dividing your task onto time parts, keep up to this strategy to the very end.
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4. Determine Your Deadline Consciously
What will happen once you don’t keep up with the deadline? Will you say to yourself it doesn’t matter that much? Or will you feel disturbed?
If you don’t feel responsibility for your deadline, there is no any stimulus to keep up to it. You need motivation.
Tell your teacher you’ll bring your essay ready on Monday, don’t just put a mark in your diary. Tell your colleague you’ll finish your part of project till the day ends. The external control will help you to put yourself together and to finish the job in time. You don’t want to become a cheater, do you?
Deadline is a good way to increase performance. But it shouldn’t cause self-hate due to not keeping the terms constantly.
