Expert insight into conquering procrastination

BY MACKENZIE JOHNSON

Managing Editor

Procrastination is a struggle faced by people of all demographics, but it can take a broader form among college students.

Generally, assignments are assigned, we recognize that the assignment has a due date attached to it, then we proceed to ignore it until the last minute.

In the moment that we finally decide we should bite the bullet and get that task off our Canvas to do list, it’s typically the day of its given deadline.

No matter the varying amounts of time some assignments take versus others—for example, a five page paper will more than likely take longer than a 300 word discussion post. No matter what it is, we still seem to do the one thing we know isn’t particularly healthy – procrastinate.

Whether you claim to work well under the pressure of procrastination or not, postponing the items on your to do list can lead to lower quality-work, increased anxiety, a heavier workload and, most obviously, missed deadlines.

Luckily, time management experts Anna Dearmon Kornick and Jeff Sanders offer valuable insights specifically aimed at helping college students conquer procrastination.

Both Kornick and Sanders are time management coaches, podcasters, speakers and authors.

Kornick is host of the “It’s About Time” podcast, author of “Time Management Essentials: The Tools You Need to Maximize Your Attention, Energy, and Productivity” and founder of “It’s About Time Academy.” She specializes in helping professional entrepreneurs balance work and life.

Sanders, host of “The 5 AM Miracle” podcast, author of five books—his most popular being “The 5 AM Miracle: Dominate Your Day Before Breakfast”—and founder of “The Rockin’ Productivity Academy” focuses on teaching ways to practice healthy habits to reach goals and improve self development.

Although the two experts don’t exclusively concentrate on student efficiency, the advice given to a business professional often applies to college students as well – especially in the aspect of routine.

“For college students, the three best routines for you to have are going to be a consistent morning routine, a consistent evening routine and some type of weekly planning session,” Kornick said. “Even if you have no morning and evening routine, if you create a weekly planning session for yourself when you’re in college, you are going to set yourself up for success while you’re in school and long after… Ask yourself, ‘Okay, so if these are my classes, these are my extracurricular meetings, this is my work schedule, what does my open space look like?’”

Identifying that open space before the week starts allows for more intentional planning, helping you decide when to work and when to relax, ensuring you’re not leaving things until the last minute.

“A weekly planning session is absolutely the cornerstone of good time management because management is just making decisions about how we spend our time,” Kornick said. “And when do we make the best decisions about anything? When we have the time to think about it, and when we have the information that we need to make the best decision. And so a weekly planning session gives you both of those things.”

Although a weekly planning session is important for starting and continuing your week on the right foot, it’s crucial to note that carving out the time to organize your tasks doesn’t mean you should neglect to weigh the importance of them. Sometimes you have to make cuts.

“Intentionally cut anything and everything that is not tied to your highest priorities,” Sanders said. “It’s amazing how many things students commit to under the assumption that it will make a tangible difference when they leave school. The reality is that the ‘real world’ after college has very different priorities than what is propped up as important during college, and the goal of a university experience is not to exhaust yourself doing a bunch of things your future employer or customers might not care about at all. Do less, and do it well.”

So, how do you go about the process of deciding what to remove from your week’s to do list? It all boils down to the thing we try to run from but oftentimes end up running into – consequences.

“One of the reasons why we tend to feel overwhelmed is because we have so many things to do, and we can’t get a grasp on what’s the most important thing we need to do,” Kornick said. “The paralysis comes from fear of making the wrong decision, so we don’t even make one. My favorite way to handle feeling overwhelmed that’s a result of having too many things to do is to break tasks into four categories: must-do, should-do, could-do and want-to. And you ask yourself, ‘What are the things that I must do in the next 24 hours that if I do not do them, there will be some kind of dire consequence?’ – that’s how you know what goes in the must-do category.”

A major driving force behind procrastination is feeling overwhelmed, which then leads to the fear of making a mistake.

If our plates are piled high with responsibilities and hefty tasks all demanding of our undivided attention and best possible effort, it’s easy for the fear of failure to creep into the crevices of our minds.

It’s also easy to postpone tasks in order to prevent that inevitable fear of failure, but procrastinating is unlikely to help you get in the right headspace to complete it later.

“Procrastination does not lead to a ‘perfect’ end result, so it’s counterproductive to delay work that may not be perfect if and when you choose to work on it,” Sanders said. “Start now with what you have, and make small iterations to progress over time. There is no ‘perfect,’ so a ‘good enough’ end result will come if you choose to start, and just keep working until you’re finished.”

Jumping into a task despite the insecurity of failing in the process is an effective method of persevering through procrastination. However, there’s also preventive methods in place to intercept you ever reaching that point – and it comes into play by letting go of the need for constant consistency.

“From my perspective, consistent productivity shouldn’t be the goal because as human beings, we have varying levels of energy throughout the day, throughout the week and throughout the month, and one of the biggest mistakes that we can do when we’re trying to manage our time well is to assume that we should be able to have a consistent level of productivity or a consistent level of output,” Kornick said. “It’s much better to think of productivity in bursts rather than something that should be consistent.”

Remember, these “bursts of productivity” don’t have to be impulsive; they can still be planned during your weekly planning session, but they shouldn’t be expected all day, all the time.

Beyond feeling overloaded with obligations, our misperception of time also can cause procrastination.

“It’s easy to say we’ll do it later when we assume that we have the time available to do it later. And then what ends up often happening to us is that we say we’ll do it later, and then we realize that we actually don’t have the time and the space available to do it effectively later,” Kornick said. “We hit crunch time, and we start rushing – but when you do that weekly planning session and you see what your open and available spaces are, you can see the consequences of not using your time well. When you have that bird’s-eye view of your week, it makes the consequences of doing it later just so much more real.”

Allotting more time for tasks on the frontend when planning your week is another key to combating procrastination.

“There’s this principle called the planning fallacy, and the planning fallacy states that we, as human beings, consistently underestimate how much time things take us. It’s just a part of human nature,” Kornick said. “We look at something and we think, ‘Oh, that should take me 30 minutes,’ and then in reality, it probably is going to take us about 45 or an hour. And so the way that I like to beat the planning fallacy is to think to yourself, ‘Okay, I think it’s going to take me an hour and a half to get this paper done. So, I’m going to give myself 30 more minutes.’ And then the second piece is to take the thing that you’re doing and break it down into smaller pieces.”

“Breaking it down into smaller pieces” entails gathering all the steps you need to follow in order to complete that task and divide it down into even smaller time increments.

For example, if you’re writing a paper, estimate how long each step will take – researching your topic, developing an outline, writing your introduction and so on.

While these measures significantly reduce the likelihood of missing a deadline, sometimes things can throw you off track. When you miss a deadline or fall behind, the ticket to getting back on schedule is to revisit your priorities.

“The process to get work done is the same whether or not you are behind schedule,” Sanders said. “Working on your highest priorities when you have missed deadlines simply means your most important tasks are the ones that will get you caught up first. It’s the same principle as paying off debts when you have missed payments — pay off the latest and most expensive debts before all the others. If you’re always working on what is most important in the moment, you won’t have to fear what is coming next — it’s just the next most important task.”

There’s a fine line to beating procrastination.

You need to plan ahead, but also take each project one at a time.

You must be accountable, but also flexible when necessary.

However, most importantly, you need to be okay with the imperfections conquering procrastination and time management will present.

“Be okay with things not going perfectly. Be okay with making mistakes,” Kornick said. “Because the way that you manage your time right now as a college student is going to change once you get out of college – it’s going to change after your first job. Time management is not one of those things that we can set and forget and expect that the methods that worked for us at one point are going to work for us forever.”

Despite the constant evolution of your personal time management, nailing down your current priorities will have a lasting effect.

Although we as people might not ever fully understand time or completely remove procrastination from our lives, we can at least decide what components in our lives are the most important – and that discovery is just within reach of a weekly planning session.