This note summarizes the material in a MOOC, LHTL.

The causation of procrastination

The unwillingness of doing a task evokes a pain in your brain, in the same region where a physical pain emerges. This slides you to other things you’re temporally interested in so as to cease this pain. This, then, makes procrastination.

Methods of struggling with procrastination

Focusing on process, instead of product.

The unwillingness of doing a task is, usually, caused by realizing it’s hard to be accomplished. To deal with this, we’d better focus our attention on the process, instead of the product. Precisely, divide the whole task into sub-tasks and sub-sub-tasks; and then focus on them one by one. Then, accomplishment of each sub-task is no longer hard, so that the causation of procrastination vanishes.

Practically, you can list out what you will do tomorrow before sleeping, detailed in each step of every task.

Allocate your willpower unto procrastination cues.

Exhausting your willpower in struggling with procrastination is far from wise, since willpower is valuable. The only place to allocate your willpower is watching out procrastination cues, such as “I’m suffering from tension, with which I cannot studying well. So, it’s time to watch a movie”.

If you stride forward the first step, then you will find that following steps are not that hard!

Work out the hardest task in the morning.

Well, you know the reason if you’re procrastinating.

Finally,

May the FSM be with your great struggling with procrastination.