How To Stop Procrastinating And Start Studying
We have a problem as old as time here (or at least I think so). How to stop Procrastinating and start studying?
But before that here is another story recap:
Actually, rather than doing a story recap every single time, you can check out the whole story here:
- How To Plan Your Day For Studying
- How To Focus When You Are Studying
- How To Stop Procrastinating And Start Studying
As you can see by these titles, you can learn how to plan your day for studying and after learning that you can learn how to focus. The next step is to stop procrastinating and start studying.
Why am I first learning how to focus and then how to stop procrastinating?
If I taught you how to stop procrastinating first, and you implemented the methods successfully, you probably wouldn’t even bother to learn how to focus, right?
After learning how to stop procrastinating the last step to learn is what to do when you are low on energy. But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves and learn about procrastination first.
Before we begin, there is one thing I have to clarify. I will give you advice as if you have a test next week and need to get yourself to start studying. If you want to learn how to fully beat procrastination (by the way, that is impossible, but if you want to learn the hard way go ahead and try😃), there is plenty of good advice on the internet(so much, that I am sick of it).
Enough of my ranting, it’s time to give you some useful advice.
When I think of things that cause me to procrastinate, the first one that comes to mind is my mobile phone. In “How To Focus When You Are Studying” I called your mobile phone your biggest enemy.
That is still the case even here.
Rather than the endless notification attacks, you must deal with apps that can provide endless entertainment. And if you don’t deal with them the right way, they cause endless trouble.
So, how to deal with the endless entertainment of mobile phone apps (mainly social media)?
The best way to deal with mobile phone apps is to not deal with them at all. If you delete all social media apps from your phone you won’t be distracted by them, right? If you think about using a PC instead of your phone, there is a solution for that too. There are Chrome extensions that stop you from using social media.
If you want to take back the time social media takes from you, I suggest you try using these methods.
And, as always, you can just try it once.
It won’t hurt you to try it once. If you feel that the results are good, you can continue to use these methods every time you have a test. After the test is over, you can reinstall the apps, and everything is back to normal.
If you plan to study in the morning, I suggest that you do not even look at the phone until you finish studying. I find that if I look at my phone and think about how I have to study, I start thinking about anything else but studying.
There was a time when I started looking at the news since I deleted all of my apps (yes, I was that desperate). So to avoid this situation (or something similar), promise yourself to not look at the phone in the morning.
And, on the topic of news, they are no better than the social media. Just like with social media, there is endless scrolling, which takes away your time. I don’t know about you, but most of the news that I read is negative, and after reading such news I find it hard to concentrate on studying.
Conclusion: No news before studying.
If you delete your social media and then turn to something else, you are still procrastinating. If deleting social media has this effect on you, do this:
- Make a lot (at least 10) windows on the home screen of your mobile phone
- Put social media apps on one of the windows
Every time you want to go on any social media you will have to scroll to get to it. At that moment think, “Do I really want to be doing this right now, or would I rather study”?
Just after your mobile phone, the next enemy you have to fight against is TV. And, just like with your phone the best way to deal with it is to not deal with it. Now, this is a bit harder, since the only way the only way is to completely remove the TV, which most of us can’t do (if you think you can do it, then I suggest you do).
The best method I found is to give the remote controller to someone, making it hard to change channels. If you have to get up to change the channel you are watching every time, you might find studying easier.
The true danger of mobile phones and TVs is that once you start it can be hard to stop. They can take enormous amounts of your time.
Do you sometimes think “If I just had more time to study I could have done better!”
Let’s say you spend 2 hours (it’s definitely more, and you know I am being generous here) between the mobile phone and television daily. If you drop that to 1 hour per day, you will gain 1 hour of extra time every day (I am sure that was hard to figure out). If you do it for the whole month that is 30 extra hours of studying.
Could you get a better mark with 30 extra hours?
I am sure you can. So, the next time you have to prepare for a test, make sure to get that extra time.
* * * * *
Now that you have control over your mobile phone and TV you can start studying and there won’t be anything to stop you, right?
Not quite. The reason why you start procrastinating in the first place is because you feel that what you are about to study is going to be hard. Just thinking about it makes you want to avoid it. Mobile phones and television are the easiest things to turn to when you feel that way.
Even if you have control over them, there will always be something that can distract you, since in your mind everything is better than studying.
One way to fight against this is to split your studying into smaller sessions, rather than one big study session. One way to effectively split your study session is to use The Pomodoro Technique.
If you think that you have to study for just 25 minutes, you will be more likely to start. Once you start and pick up momentum then it’s smooth sailing from there.
What if 25 minutes is still too big of a hurdle?
Believe it or not, this is a valid question. To some students, the material seems so overwhelming that 25 minutes is still too much.
In that case, lower the time for the first session even further. Go down to 5 minutes if you have to. Most of the time the material seems harder than it is. Use this first 5 minutes to push yourself to start. And once you start you will realize that the material looked scarier than it actually was.
If you want another incentive to start studying, pick out one song that you really like, and listen to it only before you start studying.
Now, that we are nearly at the end, let’s discuss one last thing.
What if I start procrastinating in the middle of my study session?
One reason this might happen is because you are getting bored. First of all, never look at your phone. You are just inviting trouble.
While you look for the next thing to get rid of your boredom, how about pausing for a second?
Just because you are bored, that doesn’t mean that is a bad thing. Don’t do anything for a while, and you will get even more bored, so much so that you will want to go back to studying (since that is better than being bored).
The next problem would occur if some thought goes through your mind and you immediately act on it. For example:
- I should go and tell my mom to buy me ice cream when she goes out
- There was a game last night, I wonder if my team won
- I agreed to meet up with my friends, I should check if all of us are still going
And so on. Although, these things look like 2-3 minute distractions, what happens when you start talking to someone or go on Google to see something and lose half an hour?
But, if you are anything like me, once you think about something you won’t stop until your curiosity is satisfied. I was constantly going somewhere to check something rather than studying. The best way I found to keep myself calm was to have sticky notes next to me, so I could write what was bothering me.
After I finish studying I can look at my sticky notes and do everything I want without interrupting my studying.
* * * * *
The last part of this “mini-series” is about having energy to study. The main reason for that is that when you have no energy you think about how hard it is going to be to study, which leads to (yep, you guessed it right) procrastination.
There are other problems that come from low amounts of energy, but let’s save that for the next time.
One last piece of advice for my fellow gamers:
You might have noticed how I barely said anything about games being a distraction. It’s not that they aren’t, it’s just that I am still so bad at dealing with them. The method I currently use is to remove all of the games from my desktop and hope that I am too lazy to look for them (I don’t play games on my mobile phone so that is not a problem, but if you do, do the same things you did with social media apps).
Remember:
The best way to deal with your mobile phone is to not deal with it at all.
Make it as hard as possible to access social media apps to prevent endless scrolling.
Thinking that what you have to study is too hard leads to procrastination, so make sure to make it as easy as possible to start.
If something is bothering you during the time you study, write it somewhere and deal with it later.
