Procrastination
Last updated
Last updated
When you look at something that you really rather not do, it seems that you activate the areas of your brain associated with pain. Your brain, naturally enough, looks for a way to stop that negative stimulation by switching your attention to something else that feels better.
But here's the trick. Researchers discovered that not long after people might start actually working out what they didn't like, that neurodiscomfort disappeared.
Pomodoro technique - set a timer to 25 mins, turn off all interruptions and focus. Give yourself a reward when you're done.
Example:
Just imagine backing out of a driveway for the first time ever in your life. For some of you, that might seem like a pretty exciting proposition. The first time you might do this, you would be in hyper alert. The deluge of information coming at you would make the job seem almost impossibly difficult. But once you've chunked how to back up down your driveway, all you have to do is think, let's go! And off you go.
Your brain goes into this sort of zombie mode, where it is only semi-aware of a few key factors instead of being overwhelmed by all the data. It's the same idea with riding a bicycle. At first it's really hard later, it's easy. Neuroscientifically speaking, chunking is related to habit. Habit is an energy saver for us. It allows us to free our mind for other types of activities. You go into this habitual zombie mode far more often than you might think, that's the point of habit. You don't have to think in a focused manner about what you're doing while you're performing the habit, it saves energy.
Every habit develops and continues because it rewards us. It gives us an immediate little feeling of pleasure. Procrastination is an easy habit to develop because the reward, moving your mind's focus to something more pleasant happens so quickly and easily. But good habits can also be rewarded. Finding ways to reward good study habits is important for escaping procrastination.
The product is what triggers the pain that causes you to procrastinate. Instead, you need to focus on the process or processes. The small chunks of time you need over days or even weeks to answer the questions or prepare for tests. Ex: focus on doing a pomodoro instead of focusing on completing a task.
To prevent procrastination you want to avoid concentrating on product. Instead, your attention should be on building processes. Processes relate to simple habits, habits that coincidentally allow you to do the unpleasant tasks that need to be done.
The only place you need to apply willpower is to change your reaction to the cue. To understand that, it helps to go back through the four components of habit, and we analyze them from the perspective of procrastination. The first one is the cue, recognize what launches you win to your zombie procrastination mode. Cue's usually fall into one of the four following categories: location, time, how you feel, and reactions, either to other people or to something that just happened.
You can prevent the most damaging cues by shutting off your cell phone or keeping yourself away from the internet and other distractions for brief periods of time, as when you're doing a Pomodoro.
Let's say that instead of doing your studies, you often divert your attention to something less painful. Your brain wants to automatically go into this routine when you've gotten your cue. So, this is the reaction point where you must actively focus on rewiring your old habit. The key to rewiring is to have a plan. Developing a new ritual can be helpful. Some students make it a habit to leave their phone in their car when they head in for class which removes a potent distraction. Many students discovered the value of settling into a quiet spot in the library or closer to home, the productive effects of simply sitting in a favorite chair at the proper time with all Internet access disconnected. Your plan may not work perfectly at first but just keep at it, adjust the plan if necessary and savor those victories when your plan works
Can you substitute an emotional payoff? Maybe a feeling of pride for accomplishing something even if it's small, a sense of satisfaction. Can you win a small internal bet or a contest about something you've turned into a personal game? Or allow yourself to indulge in a latte or read a favorite web site, provide yourself maybe with an evening of mindless television or web surfing without guilt, and when you give yourself a bigger reward for a bigger achievement.
Remember that habits are powerful because they create neurological cravings. It helps to add a new reward if you want to overcome your previous cravings. Only once your brain starts expecting that reward, will the important rewiring take place that will allow you to create new habits
You may find that when the going gets stressful, you long to fall back into a old more comfortable habits. Belief that your new system works is what can get you through. Part of what can underpin your belief is to develop a new community. Hang out with classmates or virtually hang out with mooc mates, who may have that can-do philosophy that you too want to develop
Learning, for most people, involves a complex balancing of many different tasks.
A good way for you to keep perspective about what you're trying to learn and accomplish is to once a week write a brief weekly list of key tasks in a planner journal. Then, each day on another page of your planner journal, write a list of the tasks that you can reasonably work on or accomplish. Try to write this daily task list the evening before. Why the evening before? Research has shown that this helps your subconscious to grapple with the tasks on the list, so you can figure out how to accomplish them. Writing the list before you go to sleep enlists your zombies to help you accomplish the items on the list the next day.
If you don't write your tasks down on a list, they lurk at the edge of the four or so slots in your working memory, taking up valuable mental real estate. But once you make a task list, it frees working memory for problem-solving.
None of the items on my list is too big because I've got other things going on in my day; meetings to go to, a lecture to give. Sometimes I sprinkle a few tasks that involve physical motion on my list even if it's just cleaning something.
Somehow, because I'm using them as diffuse mode breaks, I often look forward to them. Mixing other tasks up with your learning seems to make everything more enjoyable and keeps you from prolonged and unhealthy bouts of sitting.
Time after time, those who are committed to maintaining healthy leisure time along with their hard work outperformed those who doggedly pursue an endless treadmill.
In the greater scheme of all the different careers and disciplines that people can pursue, why are those involving math and science, sometimes, a bit more challenging? We think it may be related, at least in part, to the abstract nature of the ideas.
For mathematical ideas, there's often no analogous thing that you can point to. There are no plus signs standing out in a field. No multiplication, division, or other kinds of things that can directly equate to mini mathematical or scientific terms. These terms are more abstract, in other words.
This means it's important to practice with ideas and concepts your learning in math and science, just like anything else you're learning. to help enhance and strengthen the neural connection your making during the learning process.
Here the symbolic representation of a thought pattern. Neurons become linked together through repeated use. The more abstract something is, the more important it is to practice in order to bring those ideas into reality for you. Even if the ideas you're dealing with are abstract, the neural thought patterns you are creating are real and concrete.
Pattern becomes like the red at the bottom.
When you're learning, what you want to do is study something. Study it hard by focusing intently. Then take a break or at least change your focus to something different for awhile. During this time of seeming relaxation, your brain's diffuse mode has a chance to work away in the background and help you out with your conceptual understanding. Your, your neural mortar in some sense has a chance to dry.
If you don't do this, if instead you learn by cramming, your knowledge base will look more like this, all in a jumble with everything confused, a poor foundation.
The reason that learning to avoid procrastination is so important is that good learning is a bit by bit activity. You want to avoid cramming, which doesn't build solid neural structures, by putting the same amount of time into your learning.
