Okay so it’s not really a trick. More of a technique… I don’t want to sound like one of those stupid clickbait ads that you see at the bottom of your screen: “The one food you should avoid!” with a picture of a banana… bull. Anyway, on to the point.
Procrastination is something that plagues all of us, and has plagued us since the dawn of time. I’m sure some neanderthal cave-people put off hunting or procreating for one more game of “throw the rock at the other rock”.
So here’s the technique: make an outline. Simple, no? This is something that we all ignored throughout high school and university, and something that actually makes sense to do. My justification is the following:
The reason that people procrastinate is because they’re faced with a daunting task that they don’t know how to approach, or because the task seems too large and they have trouble figuring out what the first steps might be.
The first step, then, before even starting the project, is to make an outline. Write a really vague skeleton of whatever it is you need to do, and it can start as simply as this:
Literally that’s all you need. Once this is done, you’ll be more motivated to come back to your work, and you also won’t feel lost when you start working on it. Next step is to start to fill them in, extremely vaguely.
Once this is done, when you come back to work on it you’ll have a very clear plan of what you have to do. Maybe you’re only working on topic 1 today. But look! That’s all you have to worry about because it’s already divided into parts that you should worry about now and parts that you can worry about later.
By the way, this doesn’t only apply to schoolwork. I only realized this once I got into the working world, and I find that this is most useful when I’m working on projects like writing out a PR plan, planning my company’s presence at a game expo, or creating a press kit for our game. In fact, what inspired me to write this was that I was about to start the PR plan thing… wait am I procrastinating? Cause I don’t have an outline! Geez. Alright back to work.
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