I’ve procrastinated a lot.
After taking the course for several months, I’ve finished Procedural Ruby, OO Ruby, and the CLI gem. Now, I’m moving onto Rails and Sinatra, but then again, I can’t deny that I could’ve gotten to this point a whole lot faster.
I suppose it’s the nature of taking courses online, trying to carve out precious hours after work to learn a concept or code a lab all unsupervised. Which has the benefit of “making your own hours” but also really makes the hours yours to waste. My typical session could range from a solid 3 hour chunk of uninterrupted progress, to maybe an hour of going through material in between deep Youtube searches of music videos and comedian bits.
It was through one of these deep dives on Youtube, that I came across a lecture on procrastination. I say “came across” this lecture, but I suspect it was google keeping tabs on how long I was avoiding coding that day. In any case, since I had already wasted an hour on watching Simpsons clips from the 90’s, I went ahead and watched the video.
I was transfixed. Tim Pychyl, a leading professor on procrastination broke down in so many different ways why people procrastinate. He went through his own experiences, the experiences of others and cited studies that basically proved that procrastination had a lot to do with emotion more than anything. Essentially, procrastinators chose to embrace a feeling of “good” for the moment vs. a feeling of “good” later that comes with accomplishment. This really does seem to apply to my thought process of approaching a study session. Often, I’ll open up the computer and say something like “Oh, I’ll check out one of my favorite subreddits before I tackle a lesson” and then end up no closer to working 2 hours later, feeling remorse that I didn’t use the time better. The remorse then triggers further procrastination, and further procrastination and it keeps spiraling. Even if I do accomplish some studying for the day, I’ll often use this bit of accomplishment to justify watching a movie or going out for the night. A simple 2 hour coding session can be used to procrastinate 6 hours!
The most important technique to combat procrastination came toward the end of the video when Pychyl talked about how tasks may seem insurmountable, therefore not worthy of starting the first place. This is just a way of framing the task as vague. Instead of framing an objective this way, he states that clear intention will result in action. Instead of saying something like “I’ll study all day Sunday”, it is better to say something like “In situation x, I will do y to accomplish subgoal z.” Connecting a goal and a framing an action within a situation allows you to be mindful of the task at hand and avoids unhelpful thoughts of doubt.
Watching the video finally made me identify the emotions toward studying and allowed me to deal with them as they present themselves. Hopefully it will help you.
tl;dr
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Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhFQA998WiA
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Use this formula to frame your thinking that will avoid procrastination:
“In situation x, I will do y to accomplish subgoal z.”
- Get stuff done.