My favourite strategies for combating procrastination

Do you tend to procrastinate?

Procrastination feels heavy.

But what if we could turn combating procrastination into a fun game?

Lately, when I catch myself avoiding a task, I’ll play a little game to see if I can get myself to move in the right direction.

I’ve discovered that it’s best to approach any task with a curious and playful mindset. If you take yourself too seriously, all the joy and fun can get stripped from the process.

Often, when I play this game, I surprise myself because the strategy works! I’ll be off and running with a task I procrastinated on for days.

But sometimes a strategy won’t work. That’s okay. When this happens, I usually take a little break before trying another approach.

I don’t claim to be a grandmaster at playing the game of combating procrastination. But these days, I can catch myself when procrastinating, notice the warning signs, and get moving in the right direction.

In this blog, I share how you can combat procrastination in a fun and playful way to fulfil your intentions and accomplish your goals.

Are you ready to play?

Let’s begin!

Understanding the rules of the game

If you want to play this game of combating procrastination, you first need to understand what procrastination is and the rules of the game.

I recommend you play this game on your own so you’re not competing against anyone else. There’s no first or second place, no runners-up, and no one wins a trophy.

You can play with others, but it’s a collaborative game where you cheer each other on and gently coach each other into action.

It’s also a game that never ends because the work never ends. You are constantly learning and growing.


What is procrastination?

In her book ‘Procrastination: What it is, why it’s a problem and what you can do about it’ Dr Fuschia Sirois defines procrastination as:

“ . . . a common self regulation problem involving the unnecessary and voluntary delay in the start or completion of important intended tasks despite the recognition that this delay may have negative consequences.”


In other words, procrastination is:

Delaying a task + you know you are causing your Future Self pain and suffering.

There are some simple rules you need to understand to combat procrastination. Once you cement these rules in your brain, life becomes easier. Instead of experiencing constant resistance, you discover ease and flow.

Rule 1: Sit with the discomfort

Difficult work tends to bring up unpleasant emotions, such as boredom, stress, anxiety, fear, and frustration.

Most of us don’t like experiencing these feelings, so to repair our mood, we procrastinate. We avoid work and engage in easier, more fun tasks (e.g., scrolling through social media).

At the heart of combating procrastination is allowing yourself to sit with unpleasant feelings and push past them. Resist the urge to run to your devices. If you can do this, that’s 80% of the battle.

Pushing through the discomfort and making a start is a significant milestone worth celebrating.

Rule 2: Make your first move before you feel ready

Often, we wait for the perfect time to start a task. But it’s an illusion that there is a perfect time.

The perfect time is right now, amid the messiness and chaos of life.

“But I’m not feeling motivated!” I hear you say.

That’s okay. Make a start regardless of how you feel because here’s the part most people don’t understand:

Motivation follows action

In other words, you have to get moving for motivation to show up.

Rule 3: Use strategies and tools to help you make your first move

There are many great strategies and tools that can help you get started with a task, even when your motivation levels are low.

Once you have a selection of strategies and tools and you’ve practised using them a few times, you will feel more confident in your ability to combat procrastination.

Winning strategies and tools

Here are a few of my favourite strategies and tools for getting started with my work:

1. Move your body

Fear is a significant driver of procrastination: fear that you won’t be able to do it, fear of failure, and fear of the unknown.

When you move your body, you decrease fear and anxiety. Movement can also help to calm and focus your mind and boost positive emotions.

This is why I start my day with a 20-30 minute run on my treadmill. It bathes my brain in feel-good chemicals, makes me feel stronger, and prepares me for the challenging work I’m about to face.

2. Just do 10 minutes

When a task feels big and overwhelming, it’s easy to procrastinate. But can you do 10 minutes on the task?

When I set a timer for 10 minutes, my brain thinks, “I can do 10 minutes. Easy!”

My brain then knows the task (and the unpleasant feelings) won’t last forever. The worst-case scenario is I experience 10 minutes of mild to moderate discomfort. When the timer goes off, I have a way out. I can do something else.

But what usually happens is after 10 minutes, I realise the task isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The motivation has kicked in, and I’m on a roll.

3. Give yourself permission to do a rubbish job

When struggling to write my PhD, I attended a workshop led by an academic coach. She encouraged me to “Write crap” (her words, not mine).

This helped me to get over the perfection hump and make a start.

Most (if not all) great works started as rough drafts. The problem is we don’t see those rough early versions. We only see the polished final product. This messes with our minds and can lead to perfectionist tendencies kicking in.

Embrace the first messy draft. Celebrate it! You have to do it to get to the good stuff.


4. The Slow-but-don’t-stop technique

In the book ‘Everything in its Place’, Dan Charnas recommends the ‘Slow-but-don’t-stop’ technique for doing things you don’t want to do.

Here’s how it works:

If you’re feeling resistance towards a task, start doing it, but move very slowly. Breathe into the discomfort. Take your time.

Charnas writes that as you use this technique:

“You’ll still hate it [the task] but your task has become a moving meditation or like a game.”

For example, I used this strategy on the weekend to sort my laundry. The first step was to pick up the basket full of clothes and place it on my bed. Then, I picked up one item at a time and put them into piles (e.g., socks, activewear, and undies). I then selected a pile of items (socks) and dealt with one item at a time.

I’d usually rush to fold my clothes and feel slightly annoyed by the whole process (“Ugh, what a chore!”), but this time, it felt different. It felt like a meditation. I felt calm and grounded as I folded my socks.

The beauty of this technique is that the work will still get done, but as Charnas points out, you don’t give up control. You still have forward momentum.

As the Mexican proverb goes:

“An ant on the move does more than a dozing ox.”

5. Make your environment less ‘procrastinogenic’

Are there things in your workspace that distract you? Is there anything that reminds you of more fun stuff you could be doing (e.g., a video game console or your phone)?

Please get rid of those things or make them harder to access.

My phone is my biggest distraction. This is why I keep it away from my body in another room whenever I need to do focused work.

6. Use the Five-Second Rule

I’m currently experimenting with Mel Robbin’s 5-Second Rule. The 5-Second Rule is simple:

The moment you have the instinct to do a task before your brain can come up with an excuse not to do it, you count backwards ‘5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1!’ and you do it.

In her book ‘The 5 Second Rule’ Robbins explains the psychology underpinning the strategy. She writes:

“The counting distracts you from your excuses and focuses your mind on moving in a new direction. When you physically move instead of stopping to think, your physiology changes and your mind falls in line . . . the Rule is (in the language of habit research) a “starting ritual” that activates the prefrontal cortex, helping to change your behavior.”

7. Create a habit

The ultimate way to combat procrastination is to create a habit or a ritual. You need something that signals to your brain it’s time to engage in a particular behaviour.

With habits, you don’t have to stop and think, “What do I need to do now?”. Habits are automatic. Your brain knows exactly what it needs to do, and you do it.

For example, I have a habit of running on my treadmill before I launch into my day. My brain knows that after I put on my gym clothes and shoes, I turn on my treadmill and hit the speed button to start my warm-up.

I carry these behaviours out even when I’m not in the mood to run. That’s the power of habits.

What if you’re still procrastinating?

Then, I suggest you cut yourself some slack.

Forgive yourself for procrastinating, pick a strategy, and get moving.

Most of us don’t do this, though.

We bag ourselves out in an attempt to motivate ourselves. The problem is this rarely works.

Dr Sirois says that intense self-criticism leads to negative thoughts, which lead to negative feelings. We end up feeling demotivated, which causes us to procrastinate even more!

You can stop the vicious cycle of procrastination by practising being kind to yourself.

To sum up

If you follow these simple rules and be playful with experimenting with these strategies, you can get a better handle on procrastination.

Like anything in life, the key is practice. The more you practice allowing yourself to feel the unpleasant emotions instead of running from them, the better you’ll do. The more times you practice a strategy, the more natural it will feel and the sooner it will become a habit.

One foot in front of the other. You can do this.

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My workspace

I’m an organised person. But I wasn’t born this way.

I was the kid who was always late for school. I’d forget things. I’d lose my stuff. I’d regularly have to check the grimy lost property bin.

When I was younger, I admired people who were organised. Seeing someone with colour-coded files, a neatly arranged bag, and a tidy bedroom was inspiring.

I figured I was just wired differently. Being messy was just how I was—a simple fact of life. My boyfriend (now my husband) even affectionately nicknamed me Mess Pot.

It never dawned on me that perhaps these ‘organised’ people I was so in awe of had been exposed to other organised people and practices from a young age.

It wasn’t until I was in my early twenties that the penny finally dropped.

Here’s what I realised . . .

No one pops out of the womb knowing how to be organised.

Being organised is a collection of small, learnable skills.

If you know how to learn, you can learn how to become organised. It’s not rocket science.

So, that’s exactly what I did.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve taught myself to be organised.

I’ve read many books on the topic, from Marie Kondo’s bestseller The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up to David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

Organisation books

I’ve experimented with numerous organisational methods, systems and strategies that the authors promised would transform my life from chaos to freedom, control, and ease.

In this article, I share what I’ve learnt from all these books, organisational gurus, and personal experiments I’ve conducted to become organised. I hope this inspires you to develop your own systems and strategies that work for you.

What I’ve learnt from my 15-year quest to become organised

You can follow other people’s systems and methods, but I’ve discovered that it’s best to develop your own organisational system. The organisational system you adopt must align with your values and goals. If it doesn’t, abandon it or tweak it until it feels right for you.

For instance, I love books, and I own many. This is why I yelped out in pain when I read Marie Kondo’s advice on how to deal with books.

In her book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Kondo advises readers to rip out relevant pages from reference books and discard the rest of the book. There was simply no way I would do that to my precious books!

Central to her KonMari method is holding an object in both hands and feeling the emotion that arises.

If the object sparks joy? You keep it.

If there is no joy? You get rid of it.

I can see how this strategy has enormous appeal. It simplifies the decluttering process. You don’t have to think too hard. But there are dangers in the spark joy approach.

You can end up on a consumer treadmill of discarding items that no longer spark joy and constantly acquiring new ones that do. However, you can bet that the joy will soon dissipate from those new items as you habituate to them.

In addition, this ‘Spark Joy’ strategy also overlooks the functional role of many items in our lives.

My toilet plunger doesn’t exactly spark joy, but it’s incredibly useful when I need it!

The point is you need to trust yourself. Don’t give all your power away to a stylish organisational guru with a cult following and a Netflix series!

Trial and error is the key to getting your organisational groove on. And patience.

Your life won’t be transformed in a day or a week. You have to trust that the solutions will come, but it will take time.

This may sound a bit woo-woo and new age. So, let me frame it another way . . .

On your journey to become organised, pretend to be a scientist. Run some personal experiments.

Tiny experiments

In the book Tiny Experiments, Anne-Laure Le Cunff encourages us to come up with a research question and then turn it into a hypothesis. She states:

“Don’t overthink it. Formulating a hypothesis is an intuitive process based on your past experiences and present inclinations. It should simply be an idea you want to put to the test- an inkling of an answer to your research question.

If you observed that you dread giving presentations, maybe improv classes could help build your confidence. If you feel anxious in the morning, maybe meditation could help regulate your emotions. If you enjoy graphic design, maybe freelancing could help strengthen your portfolio.”

Don’t be put off by this scientific language (e.g., ‘Hypothesis’ and ‘research question’). Running a tiny experiment and formulating a hypothesis is easy.

Here’s an example from my own life . . .

I’ve noticed that when clutter piles up on my desk, I am more easily distracted and feel overwhelmed. So, I came up with the following research question:

“How can I decrease feelings of overwhelm and increase my ability to focus when I’m at my desk?”

My hypothesis to this question was:

“Decluttering my desk by removing all non-essential items will decrease feelings of overwhelm and increase my ability to focus on the task at hand.”

Then, I put this idea to the test and observed what happened.

Some experiments you run will work. Others will flop, but that’s okay. The point is you won’t know unless you run some tiny experiments.

As Anne-Laure Le Cunff states:

“Once you have a hypothesis, you can design an experiment and turn your life into a giant laboratory for self-discovery.”

My personal discoveries

Through running tiny experiments, I’ve come to realise that being organised isn’t about having a beautifully colour-coordinated filing system or a nicely decorated home.

It’s also not about following 10 simple steps and waking up one day to find that you’ve magically become an organised person.

In our materialistic culture, we are sold a particular idea and image of what it means to be organised. But I’m not buying it. And you shouldn’t either. Why? Because it’s a lie designed to make us feel bad about ourselves, so we buy more stuff!

In stark contrast to the slick images you see online and in glossy magazines, life is messy. It’s a constant struggle.

Purchasing pretty storage containers and having a tidy, organised home won’t make your life less messy and uncertain.

But I can say this: being organised will make it easier to navigate the mess and chaos of life. It will help you focus your time, energy, and attention on what matters most to you.

So, I’m suggesting that you block the influencers and ads from your feed and burn the home lifestyle magazines. You’re going to create your own personal philosophy for organised living.

Here’s what being organised means to me . . .

Being organised is about helping my day go a little more smoothly.

It’s about removing friction and resistance between me and the tasks I need to do. When I’m organised I can easily find what I need, which allows me to dive into my projects: filming that video, cooking that new recipe for dinner, and mind mapping that book I’ve just read.

Being organised is a way to enjoy the present moment more. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by mess and clutter, I feel calm and grounded. It’s easier to focus on the task at hand.

Is it worth taking the time to become more organised and experiment with your own systems and strategies?

Yes. 100%.

Being organised has decreased my stress levels and boosted my confidence. It has also saved me a significant amount of time and energy.

Creating guiding principles for organised living

I’ve found that developing a few guiding principles helps ground you in your quest to become organised.

Below, I share my guiding principles and how I’ve integrated each one into my life.

I’m not here to tell you to copy what I do (it’s best to develop your own philosophy, guiding principles, systems, and strategies). However, if you’re unsure where to start, feel free to experiment with the systems and strategies listed below.

Principle #1: Embrace mise en place

Give every item a home. Everything should have a special place in your space.

Professional chefs do this. Before they start cooking a dish, they prepare the ingredients and take out the kitchen utensils they need. There’s a term for this practice. It’s called the mise en place.

Mise en place is a French term that literally translates to ‘putting in place’, but it means a place for everything and everything in its place.

When it comes time for a chef to start cooking a dish, they know where the ingredients and kitchen utensils are. This allows the chef to work efficiently and focus on the task at hand: cooking the dish.

In the book Work Clean, Dan Charnas explains how this concept can be applied outside the kitchen to our everyday lives.

Charnas encourages us to arrange our spaces to remove resistance. He states:

“The less friction we have in our work, the easier it is to do, the more we can do, and the quicker we can do it; and thus the more physical and mental energies we can preserve for other things.”

Mise en place changed my life for the better. I used to spend a lot of physical and mental energy trying to find my keys, wallet, etc., but not anymore.

I now have a designated spot for my keys, hat, wallet, and bag. After using these items, I return them to their special place.

With the mise en place, I no longer waste time searching for items. I can quickly and easily find what I need. You can read more about how I apply mise en place to my life here.

Principle #2: Make your stuff visible

If something is important, I can’t have it stuffed away in a cupboard, drawer, or file. If it’s hidden away, it doesn’t exist.

This is why you’ll see vertical wall hangers in most rooms of my house. These hangers contain key items I frequently use in the space.

By having one item per pouch, I can easily find what I need when I need it.

Principle #3: Fight piles of stuff with the rule of 3

I get easily overwhelmed by piles of stuff, so I have to be vigilant and stay on top of the mess.

I have a simple trick for keeping my space relatively tidy. I tell myself:

“All I need to do is put away three things. That’s it!”

The sink is overflowing with dishes? I tell myself, “Just do three dishes!”

Laundry is scattered all over the bed? “Just put away three pieces of clothing!”

The kitchen bench is covered in random stuff? “Put away three spices!”

Putting away three items feels easy. And when something feels easy, I’m more likely to get started.

When everything has its special place (see Principle #1: Embrace mise en place), it’s easy to implement this principle.

Principle #4: Have capture tools

There’s nothing more frustrating than having a brilliant idea and having no way to capture it. You need to be able to catch thoughts as they occur.

This is why I have whiteboards, markers, pads of paper, and pens placed in key locations.

These random ideas that I capture get thrown into my in-tray to process later on.

Principle #5: Make your space a distraction-free zone

Distractions keep you from doing what you need to do. Like a pile of clutter on your desk or boxes obstructing your entryway, distractions are a barrier to your goals and intentions.

If you want to be more organised, you need to deal with anything that could distract you before sitting down to do your work.

Like most people, the biggest distraction I face is my phone.

If I’m constantly checking my phone, I feel scattered, frenzied, and overwhelmed. Everything speeds up. I start to feel like I’m spinning out of control.

I know I have to avoid this mental state at all costs if I want to have any chance of having a productive, enjoyable day.

This is why I have a morning ritual of placing my phone in pocket 1 of my vertical wall hanger in my dining room (well away from my workspace) before I start my workday. Out of sight is out of mind.

Principle #6:  Make rubbish plans

I used to feel intimidated by the idea of planning, so I rarely planned my week or day.

But over the past few years, I’ve become a planning machine. Why? Because plans are powerful. Even rubbish plans work wonders!

As Ned Brockman says, plans “help make you less anxious about the howling chaos of modern life.”

Here’s how I create my ‘rubbish’ plans for the week and day:

At the end of every week (on a Sunday), I create a plan for the week ahead.

I do this by reflecting on the week I’ve just had (What did I do this week? Can I claim any wins? Are there any unfinished tasks or people I need to get back to?) and looking at the week ahead (What do I need to do this week?).

I write out all the major to-dos for the next seven days on a list.

This list usually overwhelms me (there’s always a lot to do!). To combat this feeling of overwhelm, I transfer a few tasks from the list to an index card. This is my daily card (the to-do list for the day).

As I complete each task, I mark it off my daily card. As I see more items being marked off, it builds positive momentum and a sense of progress and satisfaction.

Principle #7:  Orient yourself in time with planners

I use a paper-based planner and a massive year-in-a-glance calendar to help me keep track of my commitments.

When I can see how many days I have before an important presentation or my next holiday, I feel calmer and more in control.

Using planners also frees up precious mental space for learning as you’re not trying to hold so much information in your working memory.

Principle #8: If it’s not useful or beautiful, move it on

I’m far from being a minimalist. I love my stuff. But having too much can be overwhelming. More stuff means more things to manage, making it harder to stay organised.

As someone who loves to op-shop, I frequently have to remind myself of the following quote by William Morriss:

“Have nothing in your house which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

Every few months, I’ll collect some items to donate to my local op-shop. Reducing my possessions makes cleaning and organising a lot easier and quicker.

Principle #9: Remind yourself of your goals and what matters most to you

It’s important to remember why you are striving to be organised in the first place. It’s not to impress other people. You are doing this for you.

Being organised helps you pursue your goals and live in accordance with your values. You have to keep your goals front and centre of your mind; otherwise, the goal of being organised can dominate your life. Organising can become a form of procrastination.

This is why I keep coming back to my values and goals (which I have captured on a mind map). This reminds me that being organised helps me to live a good life. But it’s not the point of my life. There are more important things I want to do with my time, energy and attention.

That said, it’s hard to focus on and work towards my goals if I’m completely disorganised. I lose sight of them! You need to find a healthy balance.

To sum up

If you want to be more organised, I encourage you to experiment with developing systems and strategies that work for you. Come up with an organisational philosophy and set of guiding principles that align with your values.

Why not treat your life as a laboratory and run some tiny experiments to become organised?

Through trial and error, you’ll discover what works and what doesn’t.

Remember, this isn’t about having a perfectly decorated home or trying to impress others. The point of being organised is to allow you to do the things you want to do without as much friction. It’s about living a good life.

Combat procrastination

Procrastination is a universal phenomenon.

All of us have had the experience of watching videos instead of writing an essay. We can all relate to telling ourselves, “I’ll do it tomorrow”.

The problem is our brains are wired for comfort. We’ll try to do everything we can to avoid experiencing pain and discomfort. But through our avoidance behaviour, we ultimately create more pain and suffering for our Future Selves.

You can avoid working on a project, but eventually your Future Self will have to pay the price.

As Dr Benjamin Hardy states in his book Be Your Future Self Now:

“The more you put your Future Self in debt in terms of health, learning, finances, and time, the more painful and costly will be the eventual toll. There will be a lot of interest to pay if you continually accrue debt.”

This is why it really helps to cultivate habits and develop systems that help you get started with your work early (well before the deadline).

Over the last few months, I’ve come across several novel and effective ways people are combatting procrastination around the world. I write about each of these below.

1. The Anti-Procrastination Café (Tokyo, Japan)

The Manuscript Writing Café is a place where writers go to avoid distractions and meet their writing deadlines.

This is a disciplined environment where the owner Takuya Kawai won’t tolerate socialising over drinks. As Kawai states in a social media post:

“The Manuscript Writing Cafe only allows in people who have a writing deadline to face! It’s in order to maintain a level of focus and tense atmosphere at the cafe! Thank you for your understanding.”

In order for this café to run smoothly, Kawai has established a set of rules writers must follow upon entering.

Here’s how it works:

When you enter the café, you commit to a specific goal (how many words you want to write) and a time you plan on finishing. You write this down on a goal card.

anti-procrastination cafe

You then select from three levels of progress checks:

1) Mild: You get a progress check at the time of payment
2) Normal: You get a progress check every hour
3) Hard: Staff frequently stand behind you and watch you working.

You can’t leave the café until you finish your writing goal.

Once you complete your writing goal, your goal card is stamped with a cute Japanese stamp and displayed on the wall with all the other completed goals.

Let’s unpack the psychology of how this clever café works . . .

Besides the fact you are working in a focus friendly environment away from all your usual distractions, it helps that you are in the company of other people who are also working towards clear goals.

When a staff member stands over your shoulder, you don’t want them to see you scrolling through social media or checking your email. You want them to look at you and think, “Oh wow! This person is super focused and on a roll. Look at them go!”

If you go to this café enough times and achieve a feeling of success after completing each writing goal, your identity will begin to shift. Instead of seeing yourself as someone who procrastinates, you start to see yourself as the sort of person who just gets on with doing the work.

It also costs money to be there. It is 130 yen ($1.30 AUD) for the first 30 minutes and then it increases to 300 yen ($3 AUD) per hour. Being charged a fee provides incentive to just get on with doing your work (procrastination equals parting with your hard earned money).

The owner insists his café is a supportive environment and his tactics are not heavy handed. He states:

“As a result, what they [the writers] thought would take a day was actually completed in three hours, or tasks that usually take three hours were done in one.”

You may not have an anti-procrastination café in your neighbourhood, but there’s nothing to stop you from setting up your own writing café experience and applying the same or similar rules.

This is what a group of PhD students and I did to help us write our theses (you can read more about this here).

2. Nights Against Procrastination

This event is run by a number of universities around the world. Students are encouraged to come along with a work project they have been avoiding.

Educators, mental health nurses, therapy dogs, librarians, and academic coaches are on standby, ready to help students tackle their specific procrastination issues.

For instance, if a student is procrastinating with writing an essay because they don’t know how to write an academic essay, they can get help from an academic coach.

If a student is procrastinating because they get easily distracted, they can receive coaching on various strategies, such as the Pomodoro Technique, that will help them to deal with distractions and focus their mind.

When it comes to procrastination, there is no one size fits all approach. Nights Against Procrastination are popular and effective because they offer students a smorgasbord of different strategies and solutions to combat procrastination.

3. Beeminder app

The Beeminder app is a commitment device/goal setting app that helps you stay on track with achieving your goals. Here’s how it works:

You commit to a goal (e.g., Read 70 pages per week). You set a daily target (e.g., 10 pages per day). If you get derailed from achieving your goal, you get stung with a charge from your credit card (you pledge the particular amount).

Beeminder app

It sounds harsh but this app is your accountability buddy. There’s a real consequence associated with not engaging in the behaviour. This can give you the extra motivational boost you need to make a start.

The great thing about this app is it integrates with other apps and programs (e.g., Fitbit, Garmin, Duolingo, and RescueTime). Once you set up these integrations it’s a lot harder for you to weasel out of your goals. The data gets automatically imported into the Beeminder app and the data speaks for itself. You either achieved your daily goal or you didn’t.

If you’re going to use this app, you need to be really clear about your goals. And you need to be serious about achieving them because let’s face it, losing money hurts.

4. Cave Days

Cave Days are online focused work sprint sessions that take place on Zoom. You’re instructed to leave your camera on, put your phone away, close any unnecessary tabs, and work for 45 – 52 minutes. Before your work sprint session, you set a goal for what you want to accomplish.

Cave days

These work sessions are facilitated by a ‘Trained Cave Guide’. The Cave Guide doesn’t tell you the exact time the session will go for because they don’t want you to be watching the clock the entire time. At the end of each work session, your Cave Guide will facilitate short break activities.

If you want to check this out, you can register for a free 7 day trial to see if this work method works for you.

To sum up

There are many different ways you can combat procrastination. But be careful – searching for the perfect solution can become a form of procrastination!

The thing is there is no perfect solution. When it comes to doing difficult work, here’s what I find makes a difference: having your phone away from your body (preferably in another room), being clear on what you need to do, taking a deep breath, and getting started with a small task (even if you don’t feel like doing it).

Quitting the habit of cramming

Have you ever crammed for an exam or written an essay at the very last minute?

Cramming can very easily become a bad habit. Let me explain.

When you procrastinate and leave your work until the night before it’s due, adrenaline and motivation kicks in. This allows you to work with crazy energy and intense focus.

At times, you might find yourself nervously thinking, “Can I get this thing done? Will I be able to pull this off?”. But you can’t afford to dwell on thoughts like these. There’s no time to waste! You have to stay focused, push forward, and keep pumping out your work.

And pump it out, you do!

Amazingly, in the early hours of the morning, you manage to pull it off. You reach the word count of your essay (“Woohoo! I did it! YES!”). And in that moment, you feel this incredible sense of relief wash away the intense pain, anxiety, and fear you felt for the last five or more hours. Your brain’s reward pathway lights up. Your brain gets flooded with feel good chemicals.

It’s this intense positive feeling that you experience straight after finishing an assignment that wires in the bad habit of last minute cramming. As Dr Barbara Oakley states in her book A Mind for Numbers:

“You can feel a sort of high when you’ve finished. Much as with gambling, this minor win can serve as a reward that prompts you to take a chance and procrastinate again. You may even start telling yourself that procrastination is an innate characteristic – a trait that is as much a part of you as your height or the color of your hair.”

When students manage to pull off a few all-nighters, they can start to delude themselves with thoughts such as, “This is just how I work. I work best under pressure” and “I do my best work (and only work) at the last minute”.

But is it really how you work best?

Studies show students who leave their work until the last minute don’t do as well as other students. They also tend to make more mistakes.

This study found procrastinators report higher stress levels, worse health, and lower grades.

Longitudinal study on procrastination

My cramming daze

When I first started university, I spent many late nights in the After Hours Computer Lab with my friends, crazily churning out essays the night before they were due. My friends and I were powered by bright fluorescent lights, sugary drinks, and snacks from the university vending machines.

At the time, it felt like fun. There was a sense of camaraderie in that computer lab. It was comforting to take a break when I hit a milestone (“Word Count: 1,000 words. Woohoo!”) and sink my teeth into a supersized chocolate chip cookie.

But looking back, that computer lab was a pretty depressing place to hang out. I can’t help but feel sorry for my younger self (Poor kid. What was I thinking?).

I can now see how the bad habit of cramming fuelled all these other bad habits at the time (e.g., bingeing on processed junk food and an erratic sleep routine). We were all suffering in that computer lab. We all needed help.

But when you’re stuck in that last minute, crazed, cramming habit loop you can’t see that you’ve got problems. You can’t see you’re heading for trouble. It’s the only way you know how to function and get stuff done.

Why can it feel so hard to break the cramming habit?

It can feel hard for two reasons:

1) Procrastination delivers instant rewards (i.e., relief from the pain and discomfort of studying or writing a difficult essay). In contrast, the rewards that come from studying for an exam or working on an essay aren’t instant or guaranteed; and
2) The negative impacts of cramming don’t hit you straight away.

If after you reached the word count, you instantly felt really awful (e.g., mentally foggy, completely exhausted, and highly irritable) and all the mistakes and errors you had made flashed before your eyes, you would probably reconsider pulling all-nighters. You’d think to yourself, “This isn’t worth it. I feel terrible.” But it doesn’t work like that.

Like a bad hangover, that awful groggy feeling doesn’t hit you until several hours later. In relation to your grade and feedback, you don’t usually receive these until several weeks later. By then, you’ve forgotten how awful the cramming experience was.

When you enjoy the challenge of cramming

Despite the negative impacts of cramming, some students tell me that they genuinely enjoy the challenge of cramming.

If this is you, I want you to think of cramming as being like an extreme sport, like Waterfall Kayaking, Skydiving and Barefoot Waterskiing. The sport of cramming requires a particular set of skills to pull off without seriously harming yourself. You’ll need to get better at:

• Managing your limited time and energy
• Managing your stress levels
• Memorising large amounts of material in a short period of time
• Keeping yourself awake for long periods of time (seriously not a good idea!)

I need to stress the following . . . going without sleep for long periods of time is incredibly dangerous.

In fact, this is why the Guinness World Records no longer accepts records for people going without sleep. This organisation will acknowledge records for people swallowing swords under water and pulling trains with their teeth, but not sleep deprivation records. That says a lot!

What about students who try to override their biological limits by taking medications like Ritalin (prescribed for attention deficit disorder) to get through cramming sessions?

Think twice about doing this.

As Dr Anna Lembke states in her book Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence:

“[These medications] promote short-term memory and attention, but there is little to no evidence for enhanced long-term complex cognition, improved scholarship, or higher grades.”

Life without cramming: A new approach

The good news is procrastination and cramming are habits. And habits can be changed.

This is the topic of my latest book Ace Tests, Exams, and Big Life Projects: How to End Last Minute Cramming, Reclaim Your Sleep, and Restore Your Sanity.

In my book, I explore why we often avoid preparing for exams. One reason we avoid exam preparation is because we’re scared. We fear the discomfort and pain it will bring up.

You see, we perceive exams as being like this creature . . .

A big jumbled, tangled mess of ideas (I call this creature the Beast of Overwhelm). We look at the creature (i.e., all the work we need to do) and it brings up a cringey discomfort. Since we don’t like feeling uncomfortable, we run from this creature. We run to anything that brings us instant gratification, comfort, and relief.

The problem is every time we do this we are moving further away from our long-term goals. Ultimately, when we procrastinate we are making life harder for our future selves.

So, what can you do instead?

You can start by making some tweaks to your environment. Redesign your study space to make it harder to escape from the beast. Create a focus friendly environment that allows you to hang out with the beast for a little longer.

For instance, set up barriers between you and the things that try to hijack your attention. Internet blocker apps, a Kitchen safe (Ksafe) for your phone, noise blocking earmuffs, and AdBlocker plugins can help you stay on track and move closer towards your goals.

Another strategy worth adopting is setting the bar really low. Try creating some tiny habit recipes.

The Tiny Habits method (created by Professor BJ Fogg) is the complete opposite of cramming. Tiny habits are behaviours that take less than 30 seconds to do. Unlike cramming (which can feel painful), tiny habits are fun, fast, and easy.

As Giovanni Dienstmann states in his book Mindful Self-Discipline:

“Don’t aim for perfect – aim for better than yesterday. Aim for 1% improvements every day. This compounds into huge results over time.”

This is certainly what I’ve found with using tiny habits. Tiny improvements add up over time to something really solid.

To sum up

You can break the cramming habit once and for all. All it takes are a few strategies, a bit of understanding of basic psychology, and some practice. By creating better study habits, you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish over time. You’ll also feel a whole lot better, too.

Ace Test, Exams and Big Life Projects is now available for purchase.