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Published: January 10th, 2017Before any progress can be made with procrastination, one must have a thorough understanding of the problem situation. What are the key aspects of an example of procrastination, and how do these relate to some present inactivity? How can we understand our situation well enough, that we can determine what tools or skills are required? Inability to find a useful tool, or failure to perceive all contributing factors will decrease our chances of breaking free from delaying behavior.
The goal of our first strategy is to build situational awareness, and create tools that are organized in a way we can easily recall. A trick for becoming more aware about a situation is simply to brainstorm, and the method we will use is plain keyword generation. We just want to identify all the important parts we are dealing with, which is more difficult than one would expect. These keywords can be thought of as factors, dimensions, variables, or summary aspects of the situation. Secondly, for any keyword we have, we can list related tools, which are tips, recommendations, principles, and sub-strategies. Organized factors and tools alone provide a simple but powerful method that can be put into immediate action, and can be extended for new circumstances. The problems of situational breadth and depth are addressed strategically, by expanding upon keywords and inserting new tools. We will have a prototype to guide us, and a means to deal with the uniquenesses of new but related issues.
Let us consider the first aspect of the strategy concerning situational awareness. It must be recognized that what we comfortably call a "situation" is poorly understood. A situation is something incredibly abstract; we use the word routinely without seeing all that must come together for the idea to be useful, or even exist linguistically. When we are asked to describe a situation precisely, we find that we cannot do it—ever. This may appear an exaggeration, but it is not, at least not regarding human behavior. The case of a procrastination situation is no different, and we continually fail to capture all its elements when we try to describe it.
Here I would like to make a detour. Casual readers may want to skip this, and proceed directly to the tips and tools at the end. More interested readers should proceed, since it includes preparatory material, and isn't too long. To progress through later parts of this series we will need to have a working understanding of what a situation is. I will introduce a few distinctions and supporting terms. What follows may appear to be a philosophical or metaphysical discussion, but do not be confused—it deals with current practical problems that are unsolved within the sciences. There is no consensus about the best methods of representing interrelated pieces of information in the real world, in data storage or running software (the ultimate destinations for managing information). No model exists in any science that can represent something so abstract as a prototypical situation. That would require a model to represent situational models of any kind— chemical, geographical, psychological, astronomical, or social. It is simply not possible to create such a prototype, and map it to computer systems, at least not yet.
Situations can vary in size, from the smallest and shortest event, to the largest and longest-lasting totality we can think of. We will consider situations as subsets of the whole, which we will call the "universe" or "world," without concern for disagreements among physicists about what these denote. We understand situations in relation to their larger contexts. The largest context can be understood as the collection of all potential data that we have available, from physical raw material. The universe contains all situations, past, present, and future; in this series it is synonymous with "nature". It is just the container that contains everything else, or a master superset, if you approach it logically or mathematically.
It is certain that even a basic instance of procrastination is connected with larger part of the universe than we are prepared to deal with, so we will focus our attention, as we do naturally, on a proximal chunk, that is useful to us. Using our normal conception, we can arrive at the basic methods we use to reduce the physical universe unreflectively. What interests us when we naturally think about situations are:
A situation must include only relevant information: nothing false, and nothing perceived as disconnected. Relevance is partly understood in terms of the second item: usefulness. If something is not useful to understanding a situation, we believe it does not form a part, and we lose interest. A person who has high capacity for understanding situations will lose interest when criteria of relevance and utility fail. We focus our attention to that which feels connected and can be used to our advantage. We expand our situations as we attempt to find additional points of control, for explanation or some other purpose.
There is a difference between the utterly complete "real situation", which is out-there in the physical world, and what we imagine. We will no longer say the word "situation", without prepending clarifiers. We will say "real-situation" or "true-situation" to distinguish from the purely psychological "mental-situation" that relates to it. A "digital-situation" will be that version represented in a computer system, corresponding to both of the above.
Reflecting on a situation for the first time, we can draw from any resources we have accessible in our mind, but not from the world. Most real-situations are not present directly before us as we reflect—they are either in the past, or they continue with us into the future. We are only initially working with what is stored in our brains. Thus we have a mental-world that we use to construct a mental-situation.
Humans are great at forming associations naturally, on the basis of experience in the world, and quickly combine thoughts to form cohesive images of events. We create associative maps of a sort. We generate mental-situations almost immediately after we experience events. We don't have any choice in the process, and when we create these, before we have thought carefully about them, they are of relatively low quality; they are of much higher quality after sustained reflection and processing (or after unconscious processing during restorative sleep). When we retrace events, we make more well-considered associations. So there is a range involved—mental-situations differ in completeness and level of processing, from low to high. When it is highly processed, a mental-situation comes to resemble a more complete model of the real situation. We assume that we can improve our understanding of situations by continuing to reflect on them. Without an ability to do this, we would be ineffective at learning anything complex.
We are constantly stimulated with new experiences, so mental-worlds and mental-situations grow and are refined in parallel. They both develop simultaneously in response to worldly exposure. The mental world is the human brain's analogue of the real-world (after all, our brain includes everything we have learned about the real-world, and we are contained by our mental universe). The mental-situation is the simple analogue to a real-situation.
The completeness of a mental-situation depends on the capabilities of an animal's mind. We know that people range in natural abilities, so some can achieve a better mental-situation than others. For example, in the presence of others who have shared experiences, some are preferred to tell stories over others, and not merely because their versions are more entertaining. When I reminisce with friends, for example, I am known as the storyteller, because it is trusted that I will be accurate and complete (and will not inadvertently fabricate). Conversely, I know others who are unable to tell stories because they will alter them, and usually these people look to me or others for guidance to get it right. Everyone has an interest in cooperatively preserving distortion-free mental-situations.
A computer may soon achieve a higher level of representation, than what can be contained in any animal's mind. In the future it is likely that brains and machines will be combined to construct even higher-fidelity representations of true situations. While this is speculation, it does make sense to think of what near-perfect representation, within its defined limits, would be like. I suspect that representation will always be limited, due to having different media from which to construct representations (versus using worlds to simulate worlds). It is assumed that a complete mental-situation would be in one-to-one correspondence with a real-situation and is basically unchanging once space-time bound. This is important, because we believe we can get closer and closer to the truth, if only we were more capable and had more meticulous information. We accept that in a courtroom, one person may provide a story that is more true than another, and that as a case progresses, things can get more clear and precise. Scientists and historians assume the same. We will not question this assumption because we will see first hand later, that we can understand our own situations better, when we have a better data-model to use as a guide. So we will move on without any controversy over epistemology.
Now that we have our concept of a mental-situation, let's briefly discuss some details about what mental-situations and computer-situations include. To be useful they would include models that correspond to nature, as we have seen, but in what ways? When we look at the world, at real-situations, we naturally separate them into objects, properties, and relationships. We have gotten progressively better at this since we were mostly unable to do it, as infants. A real-situation is exactly the set objects, properties, and relationships we want to capture in mental-storage. The brain models information in unknown ways, but we are certain these ways are extremely useful! This skill is what makes modeling possible to begin with; and we can use strategies for getting better at it, with the proper learning, aids, and world-view. With traditional concepts and science we form taxonomies of knowledge (forming a true conceptual system, organized in a way that matches the world), along with mental images, sounds, and so on.... Experts have not arrived at consensus on how the world should be depicted, and this should be obvious upon reflection concerning refinements and transformations in scientific taxonomies that we've witnessed in just the last 100 years (think of the tree of life before versus now, with the rise of genomics). They are not always presented in hierarchical tree models, but webs, and other visual or logical models. They are also included in database models within functional software systems. This makes computer simulations and games possible, which model reality well enough for us to find them appealing and incredible.
The data-model and running software that is focused on a specific phenomena is a digital-situation, represented by a design and architecture implemented physically in the computer, that represents objects, properties, and relationships. Models created to represent phenomena are diverse. There are many ways of doing it in software, but common methods involve creation of entity reference diagrams, object oriented diagrams, or multi-perspective models using unified modeling language (or other methods). Implementations in software systems typically use relational-databases that are basically familiar data-tables that are tied together with key relationships. These databases (along with the state of running software) provide a snapshot of a state of a digital-situation, which then represents a true-situation. So a situation ends up being represented in a computer by entities/objects that have variables, measured values, and relationships to other objects, just as we would expect. Again, since we find it mentally satisfying, we know there is some correspondence with mental situations, and the world that we can immediately compare it with. Virtual reality can feel just like the world, and since we are fooled, we are certain that it is representing some phenomena correctly.
This concludes our meandering into the complexities of situations. We will return to this topic in later sections and continue to make use of the basic distinctions. We will find this analysis to be excellent for generating other useful ideas. With this we are prepared to discuss the first strategy for handling procrastination.
We can see from the above, the first step is get a fairly well-processed mental-situation, that we could use to generate a detailed written case study. We won't actually be creating a case here, but we need the mental-situation before we can do anything else effectively. To process a situation for the correct data, we ask questions about the various dimensions situations have, and various factors, just like a scientist would when analyzing any phenomenon of interest. Some of these factors and dimensions are common to all situations, and some are specially relevant to procrastination. Ultimately we are talking about objects, properties, and relationships, but for now we are proceeding informally, so we will identify factors without jargon. If we can identify most of these, we will have made key first steps in strategic processing of our real-situation using plain language, which will assist with communication later.
The natural approach to this process is to simply brainstorm using keywords and simple associations. With popularization in social media everyone can recognize the effectiveness of tagging for loose categorization, and its importance for combining information and for searchability on the internet. After we have relevant keywords we can organize and reorganize them to more closely match the structure of the situation we perceive. We may create diagrams to represent our experience from several different perspectives. This extends our natural process of forming associations and using them to organize our understanding of phenomena.
Since we can create keywords without reference to any specific situation, we can get an idea of a prototypical procrastination. We can use this prototype as a schematic to use for understanding future instances. This is little more than learning patterns and applying them in the future. Analyzing a real-situation is much faster and more complete if we start with a list of all dimensions they typically contain, than trying to reconstruct a situation from memory unaided. So we will start with a kind of evolving paradigmatic skeleton of procrastination. We will need to address limitations of generality, since this will create a lense that can distort unique instances, and give the appearance of similarity when perhaps there are critical differences to consider. So we will methodically prune it and extend it as we apply it to new situations (more methodology will be discussed later). We will see that relying on a list is an efficient way to quickly understand a situation in all its parts, and is a starting point for understanding its complexity. It is a great way to prime oneself on associations that one can use to quickly see many aspects of a situation, and to form new associations and find new revelations.
With this we can present our first strategy. Success with procrastination is largely a matter of maximizing our abilities that relate to all factors defining the problem situation. It is little more than finding all the points of control, finding tools and tips for each point, and then becoming experienced controlling and manipulating them. First one works to gain situational awareness by thinking carefully about the topic. After awareness, one can learn to maximize power by quickly accessing the correct tools, and increasing abilities in each domain. The tips and tools below are a starting point for slowly building up strength in each area. By using this strategy, we can better understand our situations and tools that apply. A bulk of the task is just identifying the tools we need to work with, and the skills we need to develop.
Power over procrastination could be measured, in part, by the degree of our awareness of factors and our skill and speed at manipulating anything that can be controlled, without thinking hard about it. With this we can see that the approach is not restricted to procrastination, but to any situation, particularly those that require complex consciousness and diverse controls. The goal, then, in situations like these, is to create a preponderance of resources, support structures, positive environments, habits, thoughts, and anything else that contributes to cases of success, while decreasing level of effort needed.
Factors, in this context, are kept to a personal level, and do not exactly match objects and variables we would choose for scientific investigation, although we could and would use associations like these to generate them. It is worthwhile to be rigorous in model development, but right now we are trying to be useful on a day to day basis, where no measurements are going to be taken. We will not be doing any factor analysis. Basic language simply works best for our goals here. Factors should be easy to recall and make use of, in addition to providing an increasingly powerful mental image of the realities involved. Some aspects can be thought of as true dimensions, while others are keywords that relate to important factors or aspects of the situation. All of these are encompassed within the use of keywords. The desire to categorize and recategorize excessively should be avoided as a waste of time, and here we will prefer usefulness over a well-formed scientific taxonomy, or data-model (we postpone a starting data model for a future part).
Later we will also see how important lists like this are for research. Not only for identifying fields for gathering more information, but for having search terms to use in search engines.
Below is the initial list of factors. It is composed of keywords that I found highly useful in my own struggles. Feedback has taught me that others find them useful as well. It is meant to be tailored and extended for individual experience.
Variants of the keywords are included in parenthesis. Notice that these are little more than especially applicable words and synonyms or equivalent phrases.
There are more, but it would be boring to be too exhaustive here, or in the tool list below. An appendix will be provided with a cheat sheet, containing more examples, at a later time. The main point here is to recognize the many contributing aspects that can be controlled, and to have a finite list that is easy to understand and recall. If a word in the bulleted list doesn't work for you, perhaps you can substitute your own word or a word in parenthesis. Or, use the entire list if that is helpful. The reader should notice, that every bullet point here is clearly related to the experience of procrastination in several ways. This will be obvious as the tools are examined. If some point is not considered, a huge chunk of the strategy would be missing! Since I am not omniscient, I believe other large chunks are missing as well, which means I am probably still being influenced by factors that I have not considered! This is to be expected, since we are so limited, and there is no apparent end to the self-mastery we can obtain, by careful observation and learning. There is more to learn and more to add, and it can be quite exciting to discover and apply something new. Procrastination need not be boring. It is an opportunity for self-discovery.
Below are tips that I provided a student who came to me in need (in expanded and edited form). These are informal and conversational. If you are not a student, try to receive this information as a student would. Of course, these apply to more than just the school experience.
Self-confession. Confess to yourself when you are procrastinating or feeling unmotivated. Can you tell if you are procrastinating early on? Try to confess to yourself fast. It is likely that you don't see it clearly as it begins—procrastination creeps up on us. Instead you notice after drifting to other things. Sometimes we have to hear it from others first, which can be frustrating, and cause denial (even patterns of denial and self-delusion). By not admitting we are distracted, we proceed to act in familiar, versus alternative ways. The faster you confess to yourself, the faster you can try something different. As you practice this activity, you are likely to transition from delayed confession, to instant awareness. You'll start to have internal signals of attentional drift and avoidance, and eventually there is less self-confession. It just becomes internal honesty and awareness
Speak aloud to help you think. Talk to yourself from time to time (when alone), to provide yourself advice you can hear. Be constructive as if you are guiding someone else. Speaking aloud is not the same as thinking quietly. You make use of more of your mental resources, and you can put yourself in the place of the advice-giver. It is well known that giving advice to others is a way to boost energy and motivation (even if it is just a helping hand for something unrelated). Speaking to yourself can simulate this experience. It is good to have a private environment to do this.
Finish work at school. Every moment you could be doing your work, while at the place you traveled to do it, do it, and you will see great improvement. This way all work that could be completed at school, is completed at school. When you have a full time job, you will have no deep desire to bring work home. Doing so is inefficient, and creates a personal imbalance (even if you want to continue the work). You'll also get paid less per hour that way. It is much better to use all time wisely to separate school life from personal life.
Make boring tasks fun. Add personality. Feel free with it. Teachers would appreciate creative humor and personality more than the answers, and it will make grading fun for them. Future employers will likely appreciate the personality and color you bring. Add flair, or spin the tasks to be more interesting to you. This is better than droning every day of your life—be yourself! You will feel less like an imposter when you feel success as well. It will be due to your true self. Your personality will bring you rewards and you won't have to try as hard.
Remind yourself about "whys" to find focus. Find a way to focus, so you can enjoy free time when it comes. You don't want your lack of focus to cause you to cut into your personal time. Remember why you are at school, while at school. When studying, remember why you are studying. Even if really, you are forced to do these things. Ignore that. Think about the fact that you actually can go do school, and you can make an opportunity out of it. Imagine if you couldn't go to college (now or in the future), what resources you would lose. Personally, I like having a library, and a place to research, and time to read. Now, as a working adult, I have to make time for all that. In the future, you might need tools that college offers to actually do what you want. You can’t experiment in a 10 million dollar laboratory from home. Remember what you have, and what you can do with what you have. If you don’t focus on why you’re there, you will have to think about all this when you are doing other things, when you deserve to enjoy yourself with a clear head. When you’re at home, are you thinking about school still? That is due to lack of focus at the appropriate time and place.
Have a plan. Without a plan, things will come up, that will cause you to do other things. Friends will ask you to spend time with them, you will get more tired than expected, or you will want to do other things you already do habitually or compulsively.
Talk positively to yourself. Imagine it is fun and easy. getting work done efficiently, without excess concern for quality. It is fun and it will earn you time to do whatever you want. Later in life, work will be fun, and your personal time will be even better.
Talk to your teachers. I know, it sounds crazy. Even if you think you do not have a good relationship with your teacher, tell them your feelings. You will be surprised if you do this. They will probably become more supportive since they can understand what is happening. I did not do this. I should have realized that I would be misunderstood and mostly unknowable to my teachers. But if you do it now, it will help you in college and with future bosses. It is a great way to learn to befriend adults as well.
See your day happen beforehand. Mentally trace out your day, and all the things you will do. Focus on what you will do, and not what you will avoid. This strategy makes it unnecessary to try to stop yourself from doing things you normally do. It is much harder to try not to do something, than to plan and do something completely different. Doing something different automatically implies not doing the same things. Focus on replacement behaviors, and imagine your day before it happens, and you'll end up following your visions, like any other plans you make.
If you won't have energy, you won't do it. Be aware about when you don't have energy. Put time aside, for when you expect to be active. If you have work to do after school, do it immediately when you get home, before you risk drifting to other things and using all your energy.
Don't spill over. Think to yourself, I need to finish this in the time put aside. Nothing spills out. Your goal is to energetically finish it in the time you have. It is a race, and it isn't that important. Only finishing is important.
Create a nice and comfortable environment, free of distractions. It should be barren of things to look at, other than school work, and have everything you need to achieve the task. A quiet room, facing a wall with a desk is a good option. Listen to music (best if no lyrics), make some tea or coffee. Make it a situation you would be happy to repeat, because you have to repeat it. It will be your new habit. It is practice for your college or work life, so you'll need to find a way to like it.
Give yourself consequences regarding your environment. If you are still distracted after starting to use a special study place, make more permanent sacrifices, in your larger environment. Give yourself consequences for not doing what you planned. No television at all. No internet, no social media, no phone notifications. These should already be out of the study environment listed above. But if you don't even make it to your study spot to begin with, or you don't even keep to the schedule, it means you are already distracted... so bigger changes need to happen. To give an example, when I kept getting sucked into watching television, I ended up removing the batteries from the remote, and wrapping it in a paper note to create an obstacle. Obstructions like this work. Today I don't even care about television. You don't need to go that far, but if necessary, do it.
Make the change. Sometimes the environment is not working. Somehow it is distracting. Don't keep trying the same strategy to stay focused. If you need a change of environment to focus, make the change. But the new environment should resemble the earlier environment, in that there are no distractions. Studying at a friends house, with the television on, talking about other topics, will not work well. Personally I like coffee houses with earplugs or ear buds with music, if working at home isn't working out.
Find the ultimate sources of your distractions. Be aware of how you drift away from your work. Do you really know how you end up not doing what you plan to do (on a mental level, how distraction arises)? When you become aware, the distraction is weakened. After all, perhaps before you don't even feel it happening. If it is something in the environment, change the environment. If it is something in your mind, find tricks to alter your thoughts.
Fasting from distractions. Have some days when you skip all the things that tend to distract you. This means abstaining from habits. A do-nothing day is the best way to learn this (intentionally have boring times). You'll find on these days, you have powerful urges to go back to your regular activities. You'll realize that much of what you do is automatic compulsion resolution, and urge satisfaction. Commit to not doing these other things. This will give you a chance to see how these other motive forces are generated, and spring into your consciousness. This is why fasting with food is useful from time to time. You can see exactly how food related motives come into consciousness, in surprising ways. And then you get the chance to watch those motivations drift way, and feel what it is like to not cave in. Practice feeling that you want something, and then letting that feeling drift away. It will drift away.
Reflect on your accomplishments. Doing small tasks is great: you can now genuinely relax. Feel good about discipline gained. Notice and take the good feedback from teachers. Make it more rewarding by actually recognizing yourself and taking recognition from teachers. And ignore when it doesn't go well the best you can. You'll gain energy and motivation to get that same reward later, even if it is just from yourself!
Know what threatens your job. By this I mean, recognizing the risks of not doing what you need to do, and seeing the threats in yourself and environment preventing you from doing it. Entertainment and other people are usually threats. Imagine how these threats arise, and plan around them with replacement activities, being as vivid and visual as you can be when you think about it. (“Threat” is a little over the top, but even that helps. The whole process can be kind-of fun. I think of it as a psych experiment on myself. Feel free to choose different names for tools and alternative keywords that make it more memorable).
Substitute new activities to avoid undesirable ones. Completing the work will require replacing other activities, that historically have been more interesting and motivating. Replacement of behavior is implied. To do this successfully, it will be important to make long term plans, and create structures, increasing the probability of success.
Reserve Mental Energy. Remove de-motivators. Things that weaken your impetus towards completing a specific task. Television, social media, phone, email, notifications of any kind-- turn them off. It is unlikely that these have a place in what you are trying to achieve. Be aware of your motivation reserve. Be on guard against negative task substitution. What are your substitutions you keep handy, to enable your procrastination behavior? Contain your efforts in a fixed time, when you know you will have energy.
Let distractions drift away. Thoughts can drift into, and back out of your mind, like wind through an open door. Within attentional control is mindfulness, and the ability of strategic extinguishing of thoughts. As certain thoughts arise, they are detected, presumably by meta-cognitive processes, and are promptly let go. There is a distinct sensation involved in the extinguishing of certain ideas and even feelings, that can be learnt in the process of meditation, and also in fasting from recurring behaviors. One can watch thoughts and choose which ones to "let go" or even "purge." Once this skill is acquired, there is an odd experience of being able to cancel non-constructive thoughts before they bubbled up all the way. I believe everyone already does this, in choosing what to say versus what not to say (because one can feel which thoughts should not be said, before hearing them verbalized entirely). The idea is to develop this such that one has a better "handle" on it at more times, and for other kinds of thinking. Recurrent behaviors stem from thoughts that are not always apparent until long after they have arisen, but through fasting, meditation, and mindfulness one gets a better feel for how they arise, and how they pass by.
Prefer finishing over achieving quality All homework is classwork. Finish the homework while at school, any free moment you have. The goal is to feel done, and have nothing to do when you get home. Get it done fast and don't worry about quality. If you feel like it later you can improve it. If you don't guess what?—It is done. This is a skill in itself. Get the right answers as fast as you can. Soon your mind is faster and more intuitive as well. Can you determine what homework you will have in advance? Try to get ahead.
Your goal is to improve your average, by changing yourself slowly. Think about Strategy for the long term. Patterns are key. Habits and discipline vital. Effort happens at first, automation follows. In the long term, the strategy of focusing on patterns and habits pays off. If a successful habit is created, or another is removed, then set-backs feel less important. One knows that the tendency yields a positive result. You can then actually know what your average is, and once it is at a comfortable level, you can trust yourself to produce the same results.
Make yourself a new space. Create a favorable environment, that you can still enjoy even though you will only work in it. Listen to music. Choose music with no lyrics if possible. Make it well lit, like a casino would, to keep yourself awake and attentive. Drink some tea or coffee (low caffeine at night or you will deal with insomnia and sleeplessness the next day). Don't have a great environment or have to be in public? Find a spot that approximates a comfortable home environment, and do what you can to remove distractions. Ear plugs are highly recommended. Try to face a wall or window, or away from others that might catch your eye.
Remind and Inspire Yourself. Take a tip from athletes. They keep motivators handy. Quotes, lists of goals, dreams-- are kept near. Videos and images of important people and role models are kept.
Categorize people in terms of supportiveness. Fit that information into your overall strategy. Maybe you need less time with some people, and more with others.
Future-proof yourself. Dodging obstacles is hard. A decisive plan and vision prepared in advance uses less mental energy than on-the-fly decision making. Decisiveness and anticipation creates success. Keep to the strategy and your average completion will increase. Mentally trace your day-- imagine the exact path you will take visually. Think it through in advance and make it dodge rather than encounter obstacles.
Prevent other urgencies. Your other needs should be met to the best of your ability before entering your study area. Comfort should be secured by having food, snacks, and a nearby restroom to quickly satisfy other needs. Your environment should be complete, such that you nothing would require you to leave your environment.
Keep the study environment clean mentally. Social concerns need to be left behind when entering the special study place. The environment should be purified, to be sure that a consistent mood of productivity is evoked by being in that environment. This includes a special space for completing assignments away from school, but includes the classroom when in school.
Switch to sit up front if you are really serious. In school, it is surprising people do not compete over the front seats. Success is less likely from the back of the room. It is easier to see, and there is less to distract. A relationship is created with the teacher. One suddenly finds some enjoyment, recognition, and individual feedback. Students, who are threats to your attention tend to sit in the back, or otherwise away from the front. In fact if you sit in the back, you might be a threat to the attention of others. Moving close to the teacher is necessary for those who have poor vision, and anyone who cares about not missing something vitally important. There could be a minor social cost of not spending more time with popular people during class, but you must know what you are trading or ephemeral social advantages (if they are real). This is a mistake, I believe. It is possible to have more advantageous friendships by using the appropriate times to one's advantage. One recognizes the different situations and does what is called for socially in each case. It is true that social situations call for special social attention (social life cannot be neglected), and educational situations call for educational focus. One is less likely to grow tired in the course of the day, and fall behind in topics, if one sits up front, to absorb energy from the teacher and interested students. When one enters college, and pays for education, it becomes a financial matter. Seats in the front are simply more valuable, and they do have a monetary value.
Find your rhythm and work with it. One thing that never goes away that you have to get used to, is that you will need to feel “ready” to do certain tasks. This part of procrastination will never go away completely, because of competing priories. Even if it is something easy to do, for some reason, you will find you can’t do it at first. If it is important enough, you need to see what is happening, and kill that delay, and find a strategy to force yourself to do it. You can recruit others to try to persuade or nudge you to complete it, or you can dive at it with no thought, and just start “doing.” This will feel uncomfortable, perhaps because you feel unprepared. When I’m avoiding writing an email for work, for example, I might start typing anything once I see what’s happening. But... there will be times where you will still need to wait until you’re ready (some trigger in the mind springs you into action finally). It helps to know how much time you give yourself when you finally are ready. It is possible to become more aware, so that the trigger to do it happens sooner, for fear of not completing something. There are always competing things to do. Maybe you can think of 20 things to do at the same time and can’t prioritize—so you might prefer to delay on some things until you feel ready to complete them, out of some sense of priority you have internalized. But it is likely the prioritization itself is also a hidden procrastination method. This never goes away, you just get used to your rhythm and make it work for you. It can be shifted so that the alarms to do the work go off sooner, and urgency provides the readiness feeling needed.
If it's a short task, don't delay. “If it will take 2 minutes or less, do it now” This mind-hack really works, and tasks that would be put off until later or completely forgotten, are completed at the moment it comes to mind. We cannot be sure short tasks will be recalled at the right times, and they are too small to schedule! 2 minutes is equal to 5 or 10 minutes, BTW. Accuracy of estimation is unimportant—it’s just a trick for connecting action with the moment you recall what needs to get done.
Eliminate immobility If you are motionless and tend to daydreaming, you might want to start to catch yourself being static and just throw yourself at things. Daydreaming is mostly time waste, in my experience. It is a mistake to think that good ideas will not spring up if daydreaming is given up. Doing something/anything (even with no good plan, somewhat aimlessly) somehow increases motivation to finish. It’s like an artist who chooses to just draw things instead of sitting there imagining the perfect drawing. Suddenly the work just gets done.
These factors and suggestions can be used to gradually evolve into a position where goals tend towards completion naturally. The environment itself can come to invoke the correct feeling and mood, and repeated use of that environment leads to habituation and therefore transformation. If I had to choose a factor that yields the greatest reward, it would be a change of environment and position in that environment. Sticking to the same old places creates the same distractions, cravings, compulsions, and preserves general tendencies. New situations may not be better—one has to select carefully. It is wise to choose the right places and companions for your goals, and commit. If you would like to become like people who are productive, you should seriously consider going to places they would go, and being around people they would choose to be around. Where does your future self spend time? Not the same places! Who will your friends be? The environment played a key role in making you who you are today, and it will make you almost the same person tomorrow if you're not careful. If you are resistant about changing your environment, this will likely slow your progress or stop it entirely. A change of surroundings decreases the chances of reverting to old ways. You should be prepared to change environments routinely to support improvements in motivation that you require.
I am a semi-retired social architect and consultant, with professional/academic experience in the fields of computer science, psychology, philosophy, and more recently, economics.
Articles on this site are eclectic, and draw from content prepared between 1980 and 2022. Topics include ethics, art, fitness, finances, health, psychology, and vegetarianism. The common theme connecting most articles is moral philosophy, even if that is not immediately apparent. Any of my articles that touch on "the good and virtuous life" will be published here. These articles interrelate with my upcoming theory of ethics, two decades in preparation.
I welcome and appreciate constructive feedback and conversation with readers. You can reach me at mattanaw@mattanaw.com (site related), cmcavanaugh@g.harvard.edu (academic related), or christopher.matthew.cavanaugh@member.mensa.org (intelligence related), or via the other social media channels listed at the bottom of the site.