BEFORE:
“AHHHHHH!!!!!” This is by far the most recurring thought that pops into my head as I panic before every single exam I take, before every big assignment due and even in the midst of an exam sometimes. If a snapshot of my mind were to be taken during these times, this is what it would look like.
Why?:
“Give yourself enough time to study and prepare!”
“Don’t Procrastinate!”
I’m sure everyone has heard those three phrases repeated countless times in their academic lives and I have too, but personally, I’ve never been good at staying on top of things and not procrastinating. The more I think about it, the more I realize that for the most part, I have been this way my whole life; I put things off until the last possible second and can not get myself to do things ahead of time.
It wasn’t really until college that I realized how big of an issue this actually is because for most of my life I have been able to finesse my way through school by cramming for tests a few nights before, staying up till 4am to finish a paper that I started two days prior to the due date, and in general just cramming everything at the last possible minute.
…
All of this changed however when I entered college. No longer could I follow my old ways and still maintain good grades. For the past three years I’ve been struggling tremendously with keeping my grades up, having a social life, getting enough sleep and not having a mental breakdown every 5 minutes. This is why my mind looks like the picture above all the time. So when the opportunity presented itself in my ESEPSY class to change my ways and finally start develop better time management skills that would help me to not have my mind look like the picture above, I was beyond excited.
Selecting the book and goals that I had
With the mass of work that I have to do in college, procrastinating should not even be possible, but yet I still find ways and this is by far my worst habit and also the biggest thing that I wanted to work on. When the task of looking for a course project book was presented, I knew that I needed to find one that heavily focused on procrastination and time management skills, so I thought that The Productivity Project would be perfect for me. The biggest goal though was time management. I wanted to hone in on my time management skills so that I could make time to do all of the things that I had to do as well as all of the things that I wanted to do. Specifically, I wanted to balance school, extracurricular activities as well as make time for myself. I knew that by doing this, It would also help me to accomplish my second goal of beating procrastination by not waiting until the last minute to do everything. My idea was that by learning and working on my time management skills, I would be able to make time to do assignments well before their due dates and study ahead of time for my exams.
“Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time” This phrase encapsulates everything that I wanted out of my course project book and I was so thrilled when I found this book. This book had absolutely everything:
- It focused on all of the key skills that I’ve been wanting to work on for pretty much my whole life
- the chapters are easy to read and are structured in a way that introduces the topic discussed in that chapter and then delves into how to work on it.
- Each chapter was also a max of about 20 minute read
- Introduced various new time management strategies that I have never heard about.
While reading the book a lot of the strategies stood out to me and I wanted to try and implement all of them. Choosing two was difficult, but in the end I decided to implement the rule of 3, Allocating stricter time restraints on big tasks strategy, as well as the 30 minute technology detox strategy.
The Rule of Three
What it is:
- Track 3 things
- Pick these 3 things based on what you want to have done by the end of the day-put yourself in the shoes of your future self.
How it was tracked and implemented:
- Every morning 3 tasks were written to be accomplished by the end of the day.
- These tasks were written down on a sheet of paper that contained the daily 3 tasks for each day of the week.
- As the task was accomplished the task was crossed off the list.
Results:
The implementation of this strategy proved to be a lot easier than I had originally thought it would be and I kept the habit up for over three weeks, in fact, I’m still implementing this strategy right now. I’ve found that it helps to get more than just three things done, because once I finish the top 3 things, I can work on other things and get ahead on work that would have otherwise been pushed to the following days 3 tasks. In the past I used to get very overwhelmed by my to do list as I would list out about 5-10 and sometimes more tasks that I would have liked to accomplish in a day and that proved to be very taxing and would ultimately leave me feeling disappointed constantly for not having finished all of those tasks. I’ve found that this has helped me to keep on top of my work and also get ahead and due to this, it has also also alleviated a lot of my stress.
Allocating stricter time restraints on big tasks.
What it is:
- Allocate stricter time constraints or limits on tasks so that they get done faster
How it was tracked and implemented:
- Pro retro calendar on google sheets
- The three daily tasks were scheduled into the calendar with everything else going on that day and given a more stricter time constraint to finish it by.
I found it helpful to use this strategy, but I think its been hard to consistently use a pro retro calendar because of how time consuming it is to plan out my whole day start to finish, but I’ve stuck with it and I’ve found that it helps tremendously! I’ve been able to make room in my schedule to finish all 3 tasks as well as be able to take time for myself and do things like going to the gym. In addition, I’ve managed to keep a healthy sleeping pattern and have developed a bed time and a consistent wake up time. Overall I’ve found that this strategy has been very beneficial.
Allocating stricter time restraints on big tasks.
What it is:
- Detox from technology for 30 minutes each day
How it was tracked and implemented:
- Timers were set on the forrest app to help document the implementation of this strategy
Results:
Out of all the 3 strategies, this one was by far the hardest to track, but easiest to implement and I found myself forgetting to track this strategy almost every single day. I used to be on my phone constantly, from checking my email to scrolling through social media, but the implementation of this strategy has done wonders for me. While I don’t have any trackers for it since I pretty much forgot to track the 30 minutes everyday, it led me to take a 30 day social media detox which has been amazing for me and proved to be extremely helpful in increasing my productivity and decreasing my screen time.
Takeaways:
Overall, I feel that I have accomplished my goal and quite frankly I didn’t think it would be possible. The strategies I’ve used have helped me in so many ways and I will definitely be sticking to them and implementing more strategies as well. I also feel that there is still a lot of room for improvement for myself and that I can work on these strategies more. All in all, I think that anyone can implement these strategies even though they may seem daunting. I used to think there was no way I could not procrastinate, but this project has thought me that it’s really a matter of forming new habits that allows you to break old ones.