Procrastination & Motivation

Procrastination

Many students in university complain about procrastination as a major obstacle in achieving their goals.  Procrastination will look different for each person and varies in the seriousness and magnitude.  Procrastination is a learned behavior that can be unlearned.  Students are always going to have a lot of work in university, that is not going to change so time management and planning are going to be crucial for academic success. 

Not everyone procrastinates for the same reason or the same way so you must first look at:

• How, where and when does the procrastination show up in your life?

Some of the reasons why you might find yourself procrastinating are:

• Estimated too much or too little time to complete tasks

• Lack of meaning in the task

• Lack of purpose of being in university

• Fear of failure

• The task may seem overwhelming

• The task is repetitive or boring

Reducing Procrastination

1. Time Management -make sure that you are managing your time well.

2. Define what you hope to accomplish, be as clear as possible

3. Set realistic goals, safe goals are unproductive and unrealistic goals can set you up for failure.

4. Do the best you can do instead of striving to be “perfect”

5. Find meaning in your tasks.  It helps to look at your short and long term goals as well as what your priorities are.  For example if your long term goal is to become a lawyer, how is putting off reading your English textbook going to impact that.  If you put off reading, other work might build up, you could not do well on the exams therefore not doing well in the course therefore impacting GPA, which could impact admission to Law School.

6. Identify barriers to overcoming your procrastination.

7. Make yourself accountable for your procrastination

8. Reward your achievements

9. Chart your progress.

10.  Do boring or challenging tasks first, working with someone else

can also help but make sure they are not contributing to your procrastination.

Motivation

Productive action comes from motivation, the key is getting started whether you feel like it or not.  When you begin to accomplish something you are more likely to want to keep going.  Often times the activity is not as bad as you predicted it to be.  The message is simple: the more you do, the more you’ll feel like doing it, but doing something comes first!

ACTION           ►          MOTIVATION             ►          MORE ACTION

Factors that impact your motivation are to focus on time management skills, realistic goal setting (both short and long term), using rewards, work on positive self talk and also accepting that you will have set backs.  When you have a set back you need to look at what went wrong, accept it, don’t use it as an excuse and then get back on track.

For more information please see the following websites:

http://www.sfsu.edu/~testing/Procrastination.html

http://www.ucalgary.ca/wellnessguide/intellectual/motivation.html

http://maclife.mcmaster.ca/academicskills/workshops.cfm?wid=3