Time Strategies

I’m a procrastinator. I know it. I admit it. I procrastinate with school work. I procrastinate with house work. I procrastinate with choosing what to cook for dinner every afternoon. I’ve always been this way, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve learned more about myself and why I have trouble starting some tasks. In “How to Beat Procrastination” Caroline Webb identifies one of the most common pitfalls that I find myself falling into with big projects. I get overwhelmed by the project as whole and don’t know where to start. I’ve gotten better at recognizing when this is happening in the past few years, and I’ve found that once I realize that’s what's holding me back I can help myself take the first step by breaking the whole project down into smaller parts. Amanda Collins talks about the benefits of breaking tasks into “small, manageable chunks” in “How to build a realistic study plan that you’ll actually stick to.” I’ve definitely seen how this approach can work when I’ve worked on large programming projects in computer science classes. Breaking a large project into pieces gives me little goals to accomplish, and when I do accomplish them I have momentum to keep on going. When I don’t break a project up I can end up wasting a lot of time just thinking about how overwhelming the project is, or I'll try to tackle the whole project at once. When I try to do this I end up working and working without taking time to stop and reflect on what I've done and whether it's working well. Then I usually end up getting to the end of hours worth of work with code that isn't functional. I hope this semester I can keep learning to recognize why I’m procrastinating and how to overcome it.

Image Source: Prabakaran Thirumalai