How to Stop Procrastinating

all right let's be honest is there something else you're supposed to be doing right now give a paper due in 10 hours is there a stinky pile of laundry slowly inching its way across your bedroom floor you should be doing those things but instead you're here listening to me lecture you on YouTube wait wait wait wait wait don't go away just yet the next five minutes will be the most productive bit of procrastination you have done all day and you're not the only one procrastinating thanks to a suggestion by one of our viewers today's episode

of well cast is going to bring you a three-step program to wrangle your monster of procrastination into submission about 20% of the population identifies themselves as chronic procrastinators people who constantly put off the things that they really need to do and that is because procrastination is about lying to yourself you know telling yourself I'll have plenty of time to finish that paper tomorrow when you know you are way behind in a recent study two groups of university students were assigned to write three papers in three weeks group a was given the opportunity to turn in

all three papers in at any point during those three weeks Group B on the other hand had strict weekly deadlines for each paper ultimately the ones who did the best on the papers were the ones given the strict deadlines Group A the students who had to pick their own deadlines and they did pretty poorly clearly humans are not the best at regulating themselves so when it comes to procrastination you have to trick yourself into getting the job done and this brings us to our well-cast 3-step method for stopping procrastination please pause and print out your

worksheet at watch well cast calm okay are you ready step 1 eat an elephant hey how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time look what I'm saying is you need time to digest or you're gonna make yourself sick reward yourself for getting through parts of the project rather than waiting to reward yourself after the whole thing is over okay procrastinator think about that one project that you really need to get done but calm down instead of letting it overwhelm you organize that project into small bite-sized manageable segments think about what needs to

get done and write down what you're going to be doing to tackle this project hour by hour and make it specific by breaking down this giant project into smaller tasks this elephant will become a lot less daunting step two pick out the itsy-bitsy goblins instead of going for the whole dragon the hardest part about starting any project is always starting the project a good way to get around this is to start a project off with the tasks you like the best listen when you do something that you like your brain releases dopamine which makes you

happy maybe it's decorating the cover of a report or writing a snappy intro into an otherwise incredibly boring paper step three are the siren songs seriously this step is straight out of Homer's epic poem The Odyssey in the Odyssey our protagonist Ulysses is trying to get home unfortunately this requires maneuvering through a straight of water where sailors are often lured onto the rocks by creatures called sirens instead of giving up Ulysses instructs his crew to tie him to the mast of his ship and for all of them to plug their ears no matter how much

he yells and screams to head towards the beautiful sirens the sailors must keep on track we're not saying that you need to actually tie yourself up to anything but you should plan to clear any distractions that will hamper your ability to procrastinate later for example if you're a sucker for Facebook or online video games have your parents or your roommates change the internet password to keep you on track for studying the less temptations you give into or have the ability to give in to the better you'll be at a Seng that exam okay kiddos let's

recap the best way to get around procrastination is to trick yourself into doing the work it's true though we recommend that you do this in one of three ways number one breaking your tasks into segments in other words you go ahead to eat that elephant number two start with the most enjoyable part of the project go for those itsy-bitsy goblins and number three avoid that siren song clear out those distractions so you can get the job done at these tips helped leave us a message below or email us at watch will cast calm tweet us

at watch webcast email us at watch well-cast at gmail.com or leave a comment down below we'll see you next time [Music] [Music]