Picture this, you were given an assignment for school a week before its due date, you kept pushing the work back until the very last minute, and now you're forced to do it all in one night and you’re stressed. Sound familiar? This is Procrastination. We can agree we all tend to procrastinate. I would be lying if I told you I didn’t procrastinate writing this. 

Every day you make decisions, whether you realize it or not - you do. You wake up every morning thinking to yourself “What am I going to do today?” or “What am I going to wear?” - without knowing it, you’re already setting yourself up to procrastinate. So what does procrastination mean? Psychology teacher, Jimesha Gray, who always tends to procrastinate, defines it “as waiting until the last minute to complete an activity, almost as waiting until there's no option but to complete the task”. To many of us, as Gray says, “procrastination has become second nature”. Some people find it hard to notice it or you may acknowledge it but choose to let it happen. Either way, it’s a problem. So how do you fix it?

The first step to the remedy of procrastination is limiting your decision-making. If you were to approach each day without trying to plan it out ahead of time, you’d waste a lot of energy deciding what to do and what not to do. So you’ll first have to start by minimizing the amount of decisions you make in a day. An example of this is when you know you have a lot of things to do for school but you go on with your day unprepared, you tend to push everything back. But if you schedule things, your day can go by that schedule and you’ll get what you need to get done. Instead, become more organized and finish your day before it starts. Some ways Gray avoids procrastinating is by “scheduling things out…and change or hide the due date from myself, so I won’t wait until the due date”. In simple words, have your day planned out to save yourself from procrastination. You can buy organizers to keep yourself in check or use other methods like alarms to keep you accountable and to remind you of what needs to be completed. 

Another thing is to always try to change your environment. Keep yourself away from bad habits that lead to you procrastinating. Sometimes you like to work in quiet places with no distractions, typically phones, disconnecting from any devices that urge you to stop your focus helps with productivity. According to Forbes, “Each employee loses 720 work hours due to distraction every year, and companies lose that amount in equivalent profits. Smartphones top the list of office distractions, with the average person checking it 150 times a day (about every six waking minutes)”. It is evident that with the distraction of your devices, the ability to get work done or to stay focused is heavily altered. It is crazy that people check their phones 150 times during work hours, it creates an imbalance in not being able to be productive. Instead of wasting hours from the constant check-ups on your phones, that effort can be used to get work done. The constant breaking of attention during work, studying for a test, or reading a book only adds to the harm of procrastination and the loss of energy, nowadays, most people are addicted to their devices, so learning how to remove this distraction would help in the long run and lead you away from the troubles of procrastination.

Learning to fight the temptation of procrastination will help you in the long run and will aid you on your path to success and completion. While finding new solutions to beat procrastination can be challenging, doing so will make you more efficient in your work, leading to the ultimate goal of being able to reduce wasted time and energy and make it more effective in reaching your desired end goal quicker.