Where does the time go?
3 tips on how to curb your procrastination
I started Launch School a few months ago, but I’m only now getting to the end of the 1st real course, RB101. I recently decided to study full time to speed up my learning journey, as well as my career. There’s just one problem. There are many days where it gets to 5 PM and I find myself wondering, where did my time go today? It feels like I’ve been active all day, but my TogglTrack says I’ve spent only 2, maybe 3 hours studying today.
Procrastination. This is the problem I’ve struggled with most of my life, although I’ve gotten slightly better with my time-management since I graduated college. I’ll start my first Launch School blog off with my procrastination story, followed by some strategies that I’ve used to help improve my time management.
Growing up, I considered myself a ‘serial procrastinator.’ I wore that badge with honor at the time, priding myself on how little time it took for me to complete assignments, albeit at the last possible minute. I now look back on those times through a lens of shame and disappointment. How much more could I have gotten done? How much further in my career could I be by now? It’s not useful to be too critical of your past but I still end up asking myself these questions.
The example of my procrastination at its peak was my “Huckleberry Finn” paper for AP English in high school. We’d been assigned the paper at least 3 weeks prior, but I didn’t start it until 3 AM on the day it was due. Since it was due during 6th period, I skipped the majority of my classes that day to get the paper done. In the end I received a B+, not too bad for starting it that day.
The problem with my procrastination is the same that many other “successful” procrastinators face; we are really good at procrastinating. So good, that we often go unpunished for our poor time management. However, this strategy only succeeds in a very structured school system. When you get to the real world, where your goals don’t necessarily have deadlines, procrastination and poor time-management skills are the detriment to many an ambitious dreamer.
It wasn’t until two years after I graduated from University of Maryland that I finally found my calling in software engineering. To pursue it, I knew I didn’t want to go back to University. It’s too much time and too much money, especially with easier, cheaper, and just-as-successful paths available. When I discovered Launch School, I was excited, but also nervous. How was I going to complete this mountain of work in a reasonable timeframe while having terrible time-management skills? Thankfully Launch School recommended taking the course, Learning How to Learn, as part of orientation. That’s where I found most (if not all) of the techniques that I am using and will continue to use (ideally more frequently) on my LS journey. Below are three useful strategies that I picked up from that class.
1. The Pomodoro Technique
The Pomodoro Technique (named after the tomato shaped timer) is based on the philosophy that “you can do anything for 25 minutes.” As shown in the diagram above, you do you work in 25 minute segments, with 5 minute breaks in between. Part of the reason this technique works so well has to do with the psychology behind procrastination. Procrastinators procrastinate because of the imagined pain or uneasiness that comes with thinking about the work they have to do.
If you think, “I have to write a 6 page essay on Huckleberry Finn,” it sounds extremely daunting and you feel real, albeit psychological pain. Spending time playing video games or hanging with friends sounds much more appealing, and thus the procrastinator chooses to distract themselves instead. Ironically, since the work doesn’t just *disappear*, that pain resurfaces, oftentimes worse than before. However if you change your perspective and instead think, “I’m just going to work on this essay for 25 minutes,” it seems like a pretty easy thing to do! Then, when you get started, you’ll often find yourself on a roll and that 25 minute window will fly by. If you’ve ever taken a physics class you know that static friction requires more force to move something than kinetic friction, a.k.a. it’s easier to get the ball to move if it’s already rolling!
2. Delay the instant gratification monkey, even just a little
Reddit is the #1 distraction in my life. Oftentimes I spend my 5-minute Pomodoro breaks surfing the “front-page of the internet.” But as any Redditor will tell you, 5 minutes, can easily turn into 30, and then into an hour. Reddit is the epitome of feeding the “instant gratification monkey” inside my brain. So many amazing pictures, gifs, and stories hand-picked by thousands of people and delivered right into my hand. I often find myself exiting the reddit app, only to immediately reopen it.
So what did I do to cut down on this distraction? It was simple, I deleted the app. I made it slightly harder to access the website. Now, in the slightly longer period of time that it takes me to go into Chrome and type in the website, I have the chance to make the decision, “do I really want to do this?”
Sometimes the answer is still yes, but I usually take that chance to put my phone away and get back into my work. By making that key distraction harder to access, it can become “too much of a pain” to use. A similar strategy would be to put your phone in a different room or across the room, to make it harder to access. If you have to walk all the way across the room to check twitter, will you still do it?
3. Make a “to-do list” the night before
Oftentimes, I’ll finish a task and instead of trying to figure out what to do next, I’ll distract myself with some funny memes or videos. In my quest to combat this habit, creating “to-do lists” have been one of my favorite tools.
Don’t know what to do next? Easy! Just look at the list!
I specify creating it the night before because having a list ready right as you wake up can help you get rolling faster.
There’s many articles out there about creating the “perfect to-do list,” but if you’re just starting out, making a huge change to your daily routine can be quite daunting. So for the chronic procrastinator dipping their feet into new waters, here are some tips:
— Don’t put too many tasks on your daily list, you want your list to be realistically accomplished in one day
— Be flexible, sometimes a task takes longer than expected, or a new, more important task has to be worked on immediately
— Be consistent in your efforts
— Iterate and improve. If you are repeatedly leaving unfinished tasks on your list, maybe you should shorten it. If you are finishing your tasks early, maybe you aren’t pushing yourself hard enough?
This concludes my piece on time-management. I hope you enjoyed reading it! Recently I’ve been extremely distracted, between the “r/wallstreetbets vs. Wall Street battle” and the impeachment hearings it’s hard to stay focused. This exercise of writing a blog post has helped remind me of some of the tools I picked up earlier in my Launch School journey. I look forward to continue writing blog posts, but the next thing on my agenda is to conquer the first exam!
