Procrastinators Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from chronic procrastination.
Schoolwork Solutions
Does anyone want to contribute to a list of SOLUTIONS that have worked for you to not procrastinate on schoolwork?
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tl - I posted a new article with schoolwork tips
Here's the link:
Tips for Getting Schoolwork or Writing Done
thank you tl
Thanks for the article tl! I always need new tips that help me with schoolwork.
Normy: your idea is pretty good, too. I have to find a way to develop a system that is working for me. I have the tendency to make the planning so complicated that I don't develop a system and then end up not doing the work that needs to be done.
But I will work on it.
Keep starting, and break it down
I work as well as study, and I used to tell myself that I genuinely didn't have the time. I'd allocated Thursday as my 'study day', but when it came down to it that was the only day I could do menu planning, shopping, meetings etc, and I'd only have an hour or two between tasks which wasn't enough to get stuck into my homework.
Who was I kidding?
I then decided to try just spending an hour each day in the morning before work on my studies. I decided to try it for a month. Wow! What a difference! I used to think I'd only just be getting started after the first hour, and for the first few days it was hard going - I had no idea of what was outstanding or where stuff was, so I use my first few days to organise and sort out a plan of action. Then when I was ready to start I did actually make a significant amount of progress each day. It was easy to break off and start again the next day because it stayed fresh in my mind - when I was doing it less than weekly I'd spend a good hour or so just reviewing what I'd already done. And guess what? I can actually stop IN THE MIDDLE of something! :jawdrop: This is so much easier than I thought it would be, and it really works for me. I was over a year behind with homework, and now I'm nearly caught up. I started in May - in two months I've caught up with a year's work.
And if I don't want to do it I 'just open the file'. I've got a homework file in the front of which is a list of what's due, for whom, and when. Behind that are sections for each module with the homework questions in them. Organising a file like this was worth the investment of time, because when it seems too overwhelming I just look at the next ONE assignment, and just look at the next ONE question on it, and more often than not I think 'that's not too bad - I can do just that one'.
Some schoolwork thoughts
I never solved this problem when I was in school, and I have continued the behavior as a freelance worker. I suspect the procrastination has the same cause in both cases. For many years I worked as a writer. Handing in papers to a professor and handing articles into an editor isn't that different.
I have a bunch of books and articles by a psychologist (now retired) who specialized in helping professors get articles written. In the university world, it's "publish or perish". You have to publish articles to get tenure.
I pulled these out the other day in the process of reorganizing my books so I had some chance of finding things. I was planning to look at them again. He has a list of tips that I don't have time to post now, but will later. I think these will help a lot with schoolwork. One of the tips was no time-bingeing. There's an article about that posted on this site. Click the Articles button, scroll down until you find it, and click "Read more".
I'll post the other tips when I've gotten my "before 5pm" stuff done.
Homework and Freelance work
In my experience the solutions for these are pretty similar - if something works in one area of your life try adapting it to another. The FlyLady housework and household routines really worked for me, but it took ages to click that I could use the same solutions for my homework (little and often, use rewards, don't try to do it all at once, baby steps, etc).