Hey Aska, do you have any advice or personal strategies that have helped you for avoiding procrastination? I don’t know if I’m burnt out or don’t feel like doing any work but I desperately need to be more productive. I’ve been putting my assignments off until I feel the panic streaming through my bones and it can’t be healthy. Not sure what to do about it, I’m only in lifesci but my work load is crazy. Don’t know if you’ve dealt with procrastination but I’ll take any tips. Thanks.
hey there,
my brother, my buddy, my comrade, my pal. i feel you.
you are not alone and it’s so normal to feel this at U of T, regardless of what program you’re in. i gotta be honest, the life sci work load is truly crazy and i don’t even have the time to wrap my head around how it’s humanly possible to get all your work done — your panic is not your fault, the system is just built in a panic-inducing way, methinks.
but man, i’m sorry you’re feeling that way, it really sucks.
well, i am proud to inform you that i consider myself a highly practiced procrastinator, and like you, am also constantly feeling the panic streaming through my bones. especially this midterm season, it’s been crazy.
anyway. i’d tell you it might be helpful to see a learning strategist at your college registrar, because that is a resource that is helpful for some people, though i’ve never tried it myself. but i’m sure that’s already on your radar, and so are the array of the university’s mental health resources.
the best i can do is just share what sort of works for me and what strategies i use. i am far from having it all figured out, but i do struggle with procrastination like you, so maybe something here will be helpful for you.
- plot well
my first tip is to plan all your deadlines and assessments out in some sort of calendar system. there are so many out there that it’s too much to attempt to find the best one, but what you can do is find one that works for your purposes right now. at one point, that was notion for me. then, it was those little brown muji planners. then, at one point i didn’t plan anything out and kept it all in my head (it didn’t go well). now, i use google calendar.
what i look for in a calendar is the ability to add colour — specifically, the colour red, which i use to highlight all my big assessments/tests. this adds Urgency and i need that. and what i like about google calendar is you can add time-events that block off hours in your day AND to-do list tasks AND day-events that just sit at the top of your schedule.
ahh ok i’m realizing this is hard to describe but i also don’t really wanna add a screenshot of my calendar here lol. so lmk if you want a more in-depth post about the calendar planning side of time management.
anyway, planning things out visually is super helpful for me because while i plan, it induces panic ahead of time as i’m writing it all out — which is a good thing! it tells me i need to get on top of things now and not later. it also helps you see how much work you’ll have per week in the next month, which can indicate how you should be balancing your work.
2. small steps
my next tip comes from a counsellor i once saw in first year, and it is directly targeted towards procrastination.
a lot of the time, the reason we procrastinate is because a task feels too big or daunting, and so we try not to deal with it until we absolutely have to. so breaking your task into small steps is a really effective way to take away how big the task feels to us.
for example, you’ve got to study for a midterm in 3 days, and there’s just so much content to get through, you missed a couple lectures, and haven’t done a single reading since the first week of class. so you feel overwhelmed and don’t know where to start. well, what i would do (and what i did, because this happened to me last week) is break this situation into smaller steps.
first, go through the lecture slides that you missed, and make that a separate task in itself: so now, you’ve just got to catch up on a lecture.
YAY, one step done.
then, you’ve got to catch up on the readings. this feels big again, so what i do is break the reading list apart into the weeks they were assigned to, and make a goal of how many weeks to get through in how many hours, depending on the reading lengths.
see what i’m getting at? rather than letting your brain go “oh no i have to catch up on a semester’s worth of content in three days and somehow memorize it all”, let it go “ok so right now, in this moment, i just have to watch this lecture recording”. it makes things a lot more do-able.
and if you’re really overwhelmed, it doesn’t even have to be “watch this lecture recording”. it can literally be, “fill up my water. load quercus, load the lecture. open my notes”, etc. etc.
3. dismantle yo’ fears
disclaimer: i have zero qualifications, i just love to psychoanalyze things and i’ve done a lot of thinking about this so hear me outttt (or scroll past, whatever).
ok. so while we can take care of how large a task is, we can also take care of how daunting it is. for example, think of some big deadline or assignment that’s stressing you out right now. for me, that’s a 15 page personal essay that i’ve got to write for one of my classes. then, think about why it’s scaring you. what exactly is so scary about it?
just sit and ponder that for a sec.
procrastinating is just a natural human response to a stressor — like the fight, flight, or freeze response. procrastination is the freeze. and depending on the person and situation, they procrastinate not because of a lack of motivation, but because they’re scared of one of the following things:
- the unknown, because it’s a task they don’t know how to do or have never done before
- failure <3 or disappointment
- bad feelings associated with doing the task
so for me, if i really think about why my 15-page paper is scaring me, i realize that i don’t want to start because i want to write absolute Bars and get a high mark on it. meanwhile, i’m also trying to avoid the stress i associate with writing a long paper — but it’s not like putting it off is going to solve any of that, in fact, it will only work against me!!!!
so basically, really thinking about why that thing scares you and dismantling it is one man’s way to conquer the anxiety of starting big assignments/tasks.
4. rest when you’re resting
my final tip also comes from that counsellor i saw. and it is to take proper breaks and draw clear boundaries between rest and work. you mentioned that you’re not sure if you’re burnt out or don’t feel like doing work, so i think this one might help you.
a problem that i (and several people i know) have is that when we take a break, we’re not really taking a break because the whole time we’re stressing about all the work we should be doing. so while we say we’re resting, our brain is still in drive-mode and is not resting.
as a result, this defeats the whole purpose of taking a break and then when you’ve got to lock in again, you still feel mentally exhausted. so it can be helpful to just being aware of this and consciously try to make a clear boundary between time set aside for work and time set aside for rest.
i also realize this is a pretty abstract instruction, so what this can tangibly look like is making your boundary physical. i heard somewhere that setting different environments for different things is super important because your brain will unconsciously associate an activity with that environment or something.
for example, a big one is not working in bed. doing work while laying in bed tells your brain that bed is an environment for working and resting, rather than just resting. or, having a different table for eating meals and another one for working. whatever is feasible for your living environment!
and, yeah. i’ll end it here cause this was another long post and i don’t want to bore the masses.
overall, i really hope that this was helpful in some small way or another. U of T is so notoriously hard and it’s a natural response to feel burnt out in this environment. it’s rough out here, but you’ve got this! best of luck to you <3.
over and out,
aska