This week's lecture focused on procrastination.
As a heavy procrastinator myself, I listend very carefully to Dr. Blumin's words of advice.
As we all know, procrastinating night before an exam is not a good idea.
When I was preparing for SAT exam, one of my teacher told me to get a good night sleep before the test date. It was meant to relax your body and mind to do your best on the day of the exam. Procrastination might be good for short-term outcome, but if you get used to it, it messes up your whole schedule and can be really negative in the long run.
Especially in college, you need strategic schedule to manage your time efficiently. In that front, the lecture on procrastination was important. I used to procrastinate whether it's an exam or essay, but after living under lots of workloads in college life, I felt that procrastination won't help me but rather be a negative factor in my career. Now, I do my works ahead of time or at least few days before the deadline. That way, I can fix and revision any errors and really just relax a bit and do other assignments in the meantime.
Once you get out of procrastinating cycle, it feels so much better and you won't feel urge to go back.
To make my life more easy, I used a great anti-procrastinating strategy,
'Time Wasters' in two of my classes.
Time wasters are the factors that contribute to procrastination. These are activities you do instead of doing your work. It would be perfect solution to just get rid of all these time wasters but as we all know, we need little bit of distractions and fun in life to get ourselves going. Rather, it would be a better idea to decrease the amount of time we spend on these time wasters and spend more time on doing work. To achieve this goal, you need to first identify the time wasters. Writing down these time wasters can help you realize and focus on things you need to spend less time on.
As you can see, in the left column, I listed the time wasters that distracts me from doing work. In the right column, next to the time wasters, I listed the task that I was avoiding by doing the time wasters. By identifying and listing the time wasters and works that I was avoiding, it gave me a idea of how I should go about to solve and what actions needs to be taken. I applied this strategy to my ENL 211 course and NSD 225 course. I had an exam for NSD 225 few days ago. As I listed above, instead of studying for an exam, I went to Facebook and wasted couples hours instead. For ENL 211, I had a reading assignment to do, but instead, surfed YouTube to watch silly videos. This caused me to stay up all night and study for an exam and read all my reading assignments in one night. I didn't realized this until I wrote it down using the Time Wasters strategy. Now I know what kind of time wasters are ruining what types of studying, I can decrease or eliminate those tasks to do my work. This strategy works well because now you can actually see what's going on around your wasted time schedule.
This strategy worked very well for me. I love how I can identify and see things that I haven't thought about which wasted my time. Now that I see those tasks and also the work I was avoiding, I can clearly fix those problems. This strategy will make students feel more productive overall. This kind of motivates you as well. I will sure to adapt this strategy in my other courses as well.
Just like you, I did not realize what I was doing to waste my time until I wrote down everything down on the Time Waster chart. I also surfed on Internet and Youtube, looking and watching at silly stuffs instead of reading my textbook, later to realized that I have to read 5 chapters in order to study for the test. You pointed out wel on which distractions waste your time the most and a lot of the ones you listed fit in my category as well. Let's start avoiding these time wasters Chan!!
ReplyDeleteSome of your distractions are just like mine. Youtubing, facebooking are major sources of distractions where it is hard to get out of it and it will make you get lazy. When I was writing my excuses and time wasters, I noticed that these are harmful activities when you have something to do firsthand. You just need to keep them away from your studying period, then you will get your work done much faster and by better quality.
ReplyDeleteI like the fact of how you loved the strategy as it identified all the problems you had behind procrastination. It is just unbelievable how all these social networking and texting has got lots of people to procrastinate. I think that is the ultimate reason behind why people procrastiate these days. I also like how you found your own resolution behind procrastination as how I did too. Get those works going and don't procrastinate anymore Chan~
ReplyDeleteWow Chan, and I thought you were one of those people who would never procrastinate. But it seems like you are human after all haha. I also used the same strategy as you and it looks like we have similar time wasters flowing within us. Facebook is the worst time waster of all time. I don't know why but it is so addicting and I got addicted to the point where I need to have it on when the computer is on.
ReplyDeleteI also used this strategy, and it really worked good for me too. It helped me recognize what were my time wasters. By looking at the distractions that keep me from doing my academic works, I thought to myself that I should pay attention more on my works than doing other thing. Good job on your work. Good to hear that it worked for you too.
ReplyDelete