procrastination- how do you get over it?

lisa_75

studentnurse wrote:

Dont worry, its only saturday, worry at about 11pm tomoro night - thats what I done all the way through my nurse training !

OMG! You people have nerves of steel! There is no way I could leave starting an essay until the week before, never mind the night before!

Tallulah22

i had two to be in on Monday have completed one now have to do this one.

i'm ok once i get going but its finding that 'motivation' first.

Studentnurse i think that may be the case tomorrow the way things are going.

studentphil

I would never leave a 2000 word one until the day before! I start about a week or 10 days before the due date.

If you write for 3 or 4 hours tonight and then tomorrow afternoon then you should do okay.

Tallulah22

Thanks Phil, but due to circumstances at the minute this is the way its been dealt to me.

studentphil

I think that is certainly one of the problems of university. You have no stick to do things and the carrot of qualification sometimes seems so far away. Added to that all the many other more fun things that can put you off aswell as things like families and jobs that can put you back.

Tallulah22

I agree

Anyway i must get on and tackle this essay,

teeb

rharper83 wrote:

Ooooh Six Degrees of Wikipedia! That sounds like a great game for procrastinating! What does it entail??

Well, there's a "Six Degrees" social theory. Basically it says that you can get from anybody to the world to another anybody, using connections, in a maximum chain of six people.

For example, Person A -> Person F.

Person A slept with Person B, who was at school with Person C, whose work colleague is Person C, who is in a book club with person D, who is on the same forum, and talks to Person E, and Person E knows Person F as they are friends.

Some chains are more tenuous than others [especially if the two people you start out with are in different countries], but that's the basic idea. One version I saw in a PC magazine involved one person sending a mass email, asking people to similarly mass email, until he got to a random person in the US.

The idea behind the Wikipedia version is roughly similar. Basically, it's possible to get from almost any Wikipedia article to another in only six clicks. There are some exceptions, shown on the page I linked to, that take up to ten clicks.

And if you want to cheat, there's a page that will give you the shortest link automatically.

So I just think of two random things and try to get from one to the other as fast I can. Utterly pointless, but good for a break from essay writing.

Snow_Angel

As far as procrastinating goes (and I'm on a short study break by the way! ) :

I have a timetable Mon - Fri 9 - 5 (weekends and evenings included when very busy with study) and I treat my degree like a full-time job (the timetable is printed out and kept in my uni file week by week). i.e. I have set breaks morning and afternoon and a lunch hour. If I'm writing assignments or doing course work I sometimes allocate a full weekend day as it's easier to knuckle down and get it done in one hit sometimes.

Also, rather than work at home at weekends I sometimes go to the uni library and study as then I can't get distracted so easily with tea, sweets, tv, MSE etc!

I'm studying a course where the job market is very tough so I usually just remind myself of that and it usually motivates me to get on with things.

All the above things seem to work as I'm borderline 1st/2:1 at the moment.

Anyway, must crack on with study. bye for now.

apoorstudent

i believe that once a procrastinator, always a procrastinator. personally, i've tried everything. i've even read books about how to kick this 'habit', but i just can't do it.

to be slightly less defeatist, procrastination isn't always a negative thing... i've said this in other posts, but to reiterate: a lot of people do their best work under pressure. me included. maybe i'm addicted to the adrenaline rush of handing in my work 1-minute before the deadline and somehow getting good marks, hence not being able to get organised?! however, i'm sure that if i wasn't such a procrastinator i could achieve a first.

saying that, there are some things that i am very organised with, i.e. money! it just seems to be university work that is the 'problem'.

Tallulah22

apoorstudent wrote:

saying that, there are some things that i am very organised with, i.e. money! it just seems to be university work that is the 'problem'.

i can totally identify with that, hence im sitting here with less than 48 hours to go before my 2000 word essay is due in and not even being half way through.