Procrastination is a writer’s worst sin. It relates not only to students postponing the submission of their homework until the last evening. Writers, scientists, and many other people who need to perform some work before the set deadline can fall prey to procrastination, focusing on many activities except for the one that is due soon.
Procrastination always has a high price; workers postponing important presentations or reports and completing them with mediocre quality on the last night may be fired, while students usually get low grades for the mediocre writings. These grave consequences hint at the need to combat this evil characteristic as soon as possible. Here we have prepared some workable tips to avoid procrastination and develop the habit of doing everything on time.
Engage in Freewriting
The most basic reason for procrastination is a lack of ideas. Once you sit down to write something and can’t find ideas at once, you may drop the assignment and shift to something more manageable or unrelated. But here is the catch: the more you postpone the brainstorming process, the more you risk writing nothing at all.
A good way out of the creativity crisis is to free-write. Take a sheet of paper and set a timer for 5-10 minutes. Please don’t bother about grammar or style; it’s only the process that matters. After the timer goes off, study the list of ideas that your brain issued and proceed with one of them. The key to freewriting effectiveness is to do some prior research so that your brain has at least some background knowledge on the subject. Leave the rest to your mind.
Set Time Limits
As with the freewriting activity, the whole assignment completion process usually takes as much time as you reserve for it. So, no matter whether you have five days or five hours to complete an essay. You’ll work exactly the amount of time you have. Then why give yourself five days if you can limit this task’s completion to five hours and dedicate the rest to more meaningful activities?
That’s where setting exact limits helps. Give yourself a realistic (yet minimal) amount of time for the task. You’ll see how quickly your brain will activate to perform the task instead of going in circles and procrastinating for days, knowing that you still have time.
Go Out and Do Sports
Nothing helps your brain concentrate better than a short workout. While you’re working physically, your brain takes a break and starts working much better on the intellectual tasks. The most optimal breakdown is to do some research to generate ideas for the writing piece, then do some workout to let your brain switch and systematize the obtained information, and then proceed to the actual writing stage. You’ll see how quickly the result will come out
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