beating procrastination

Now that things are ALMOST done for the semester and I've been suffering from the side effects of procrastinating these past few weeks (and because some students are reading this blog), I'm going to write down my strategy for beating procrastination in the coming years:

1. Keep in mind that things can't be done in one sitting (well most of them). Personally, this mindset is probably the most probable reason why I procrastinate. Why? When I have something to do, I say to myself: "I can do this in X hours straight". Unfortunately, while doing, several problems arise like the programming environment is not working, the memory requirement is insufficient, how do you adjust the maximum memory allocation, it's too difficult to debug the code, and so on... The point is, we encounter problems we haven't encountered before. And sometimes, when I am already able to solve the problem, I have this feeling of accomplishment already that I justify taking a nap or delaying doing the other parts of the thing to do again. Aside from possible unexpected problems, there are certain tasks that we are not very happy doing. So we always easily get distracted by Facebook or other stuff we like doing more. What happens is the X hours becomes X*M hours. Almost always, X is always underestimated so if you don't have much free time, other tasks get bumped later into the schedule.

2. Remove the Ah-I-have-plenty-of-time-to-do-it-later thinking. When you can do it now, try to... Other things will most likely come up in the future. This is the easiest thing to consider yet the most common cause of delay.

3. It doesn't have to be perfect (right away). This will only make you feel that the task is difficult. And when we do so, we always find stuff that are easier to do.

4. Don't do the easy things first. It'll give you a sense of accomplishment.

So that's my initial list. I have plenty of time to write it later or do it in one sitting but I'll post it now and add more items if possible. (Di ko na masingit ang 3 and 4 sa final remarks). Basta heto na yun. Less facebook pwede rin siguro isama sa list na to...