Issues with procrastination and putting things off

[Em_in_FL]

I sympathize… this is a struggle for me too. I tend to put things off until the last minute. But as my life has gotten more and more complicated (4 kids, busy lives, etc) this isn’t as much of a problem. I’ve found that SCHEDULING myself helps tremendously. I use my google calendar (all sync’ed with my phone) and I try to force myself to schedule everything that’s necessary. Also, I try to schedule a LOT in a short period of time - I’m more effective that way. For example - set up a routine of practicing your bass when you know you only have a limited time to do it - like JUST before lunch. Practice from 11am to 11:45am… then, THAT’S IT, no more - that’s ALL the time you get for the day, you aren’t even ALLOWED to pick it up again. I’ve found this mentality will *force *you to get it done and to concentrate on what you’re doing while you have that moment.
I have to do these sort of tricks at my job to stay on top of things - otherwise I’ll get bored with what I’m doing and keep putting it off. I schedule “short bursts” of energized, FOCUSED work time… cram it in to just one hour - then allow myself to relax a bit.

Sometimes I need to be better about this myself… it’s a constant struggle!

 

[chevalier]

Hey. Procrastination is my game too. I’m horrible. My Ph.D. is long-delayed and while I can work two days and two nights without a break if needed, it’s still a struggle to work a full eight hours in normal conditions, I end up playing computer games or visiting my buddy or having a slow coffee or whatever, not to mention having a ton of hobbies not connected to my professional field or my academic field (which are not the same). I’ve found that just doing it helps (primarily with my neverending problem with getting up before noon and going to bed before dawn).

 

[LucyLight]

I mentioned earlier that ADD can be an addrenaline disorder. Where someone who has it has trouble finding the motivation to get things done. You can have ADD and the symptoms like hyperactivity or Impulsivity be absent. By the way I have never heard about growing out of this and I was diagnosed as a child and did not have to be diagnosed again as an adult. The link below sums up the type of ADD that I think people have been describing.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_cognitive_tempo

 

[chevalier]

Is it connected with being somewhat slow in the mind? I’m a peculiar example of someone who can be slow mentally (in a cognitive sense, i.e. whatever gets to me) despite above average intelligence (especially when you use good old culturally unfair tests with words and numbers instead of the sickening Mensa geometry).

 

[Luvz2travel]

I have a slight version of ADHD most of it in my case was hyperactivity but I’ve always been brilliant at procrastination. lol

 

[LucyLight]

The link that I posted does list slow cognitive ability as a symptom. I’m not sure if I am this way or not. Although, I do take way to long computing math problems in my head. I do well on those “culturally biased” IQ tests if there aren’t too many math word problems. It takes me too long to organzie the numbers in my head.

 

[chevalier]

The link that I posted does list slow cognitive ability as a symptom. I’m not sure if I am this way or not. Although, I do take way to long computing math problems in my head. I do well on those “culturally biased” IQ tests if there aren’t too many math word problems. It takes me too long to organzie the numbers in my head.

I see. I have a similar problem with geometry. The difference between my score in traditional IQ tests and those exclusively geometrical ones goes up to 40 points. I can border on genius or occasionally cross the threshold just barely. In Mensa’s weird shape shuffling tasks I score only slightly better than average. There are instances in my life where I’m very slow to learn and I always have a problem with huge examinations that cover a big load of material and ask detailed questions about it and from time to time I cause people to ask questions like, “are you thinking at all?” and similar niceties. Sometimes I read a novel and don’t remember much from the last two pages. At other times I take only a very short time to do demanding intellectual tasks. I’m particularly bad at learning from defeats in competitive games I play with people. I’m so bad at chess it’s beyond words, for example.

 

[twoangels]

I mentioned earlier that ADD can be an addrenaline disorder. Where someone who has it has trouble finding the motivation to get things done. You can have ADD and the symptoms like hyperactivity or Impulsivity be absent. By the way I have never heard about growing out of this and I was diagnosed as a child and did not have to be diagnosed again as an adult. The link below sums up the type of ADD that I think people have been describing.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_cognitive_tempo

Maybe the medical opinions on it have been changed. I’m 31 and was diagnosed pretty much when it was very new and wasn’t at all being overdiagnosed. I was told most people grew out of it and did have to be diagnosed again in college. But maybe that was because I decided against seeking help my first two years of college. I actually did pretty well. I just became disallusioned and thought “Well if I’m getting a B, my potential must be an A.” Getting rediagnosed was probably the worst decision of my life. Having to be rushed to the hospital because your prescription has taken away your appetite and seeing the dramatic shift in attitude when professors label you as an individual with a learning disability had a drastic negative effect on my grades. So much for support. It was more like an extra cross!

 

[Ellyakamommy]

Barring any sort of medical cause, I can say for me that procrastination was a problem for me during my single life and was something I worked very hard to overcome in my married/family life.

I think when I was single, in college, working etc, the stakes just didn’t seem that high if I was a few minutes late to class or waited until the last minute or deadline time to take care of something. Once I had children that absolutely relied on me I started to change my ways. I couldn’t put off taking care of them, and the sloppy time management had to improve too as it generated so much stress within me that we all suffered as a result.

Now, I still ilke my down time and tend to do a big spurt of cleaning right before company comes over, but my day to day life has less procrastination and putting things off simply because we aren’t functioning when procrastination happens.

I want to say something practical about how I was able to motivate myself and manage my time better, but I’m having a hard time pulling specific examples (I blame it on my hunk of swiss-cheese preggo brain).

I guess one thing was anticipating where I would procrastinate and having a work-around. At times, I tend to put off making any kind of plan for dinner until I’m ready to eat. That is a costly procrastination when you’re suddenly ordering pizza for a growing family. If I don’t plan beforehand, there really isn’t time to defrost meat or make sure I have all my ingredients…so I got a few frozen items or really easy-to-make dinners that only take 15 minutes so if I did procrastinate, no one else suffered for it. (I also have those items on my shopping list for every ‘big trip’)

Another thign that comes to mind was that I stopped setting the start time for appts and get togethers based on what worked for the other person and started speaking up honestly about the time I thought I could realistically make it. I was embarrased that it was always a 1/2 hr to 1 later than the time they suggested, but I found we all got along better when I wasn’t saying yes, then making them wait, but showing up at the agreed upon time.

And daily routines. This then this. Tweaking as necessary. Trying again the next day even when I failed. Doing it over and over until I had a sense of how long tasks truly did take me. And also scheduling the procrastinator-type things into the routine. I can’ t stop being a person that likes to read online…but I can make it fit a reasonable portion of my day rather than taking up my entire day. Does that make sense?

I hope something I wrote is helpful to you.

 

[jmcrae]

Maybe the medical opinions on it have been changed. I’m 31 and was diagnosed pretty much when it was very new and wasn’t at all being overdiagnosed. I was told most people grew out of it and did have to be diagnosed again in college. But maybe that was because I decided against seeking help my first two years of college. I actually did pretty well. I just became disallusioned and thought “Well if I’m getting a B, my potential must be an A.” Getting rediagnosed was probably the worst decision of my life. Having to be rushed to the hospital because your prescription has taken away your appetite and seeing the dramatic shift in attitude when professors label you as an individual with a learning disability had a drastic negative effect on my grades. So much for support. It was more like an extra cross!

Employers and instructors should never be told of a diagnosis like that, in my opinion. It’s a lot better for your career (whether it’s your school career or your employment career) to be “quirky” and have “bad habits” than to be labeled with a medical issue, regardless of whether it’s physical or mental. We are supposed to be living in more enlightened times, but someone has forgotten to tell the “real world” about that - they still see a label and immediately assume you’re completely unteachable.

 

[jmcrae]

Barring any sort of medical cause, I can say for me that procrastination was a problem for me during my single life and was something I worked very hard to overcome in my married/family life.

I think when I was single, in college, working etc, the stakes just didn’t seem that high if I was a few minutes late to class or waited until the last minute or deadline time to take care of something. Once I had children that absolutely relied on me I started to change my ways. I couldn’t put off taking care of them, and the sloppy time management had to improve too as it generated so much stress within me that we all suffered as a result.

Now, I still ilke my down time and tend to do a big spurt of cleaning right before company comes over, but my day to day life has less procrastination and putting things off simply because we aren’t functioning when procrastination happens.

I want to say something practical about how I was able to motivate myself and manage my time better, but I’m having a hard time pulling specific examples (I blame it on my hunk of swiss-cheese preggo brain).

I guess one thing was anticipating where I would procrastinate and having a work-around. At times, I tend to put off making any kind of plan for dinner until I’m ready to eat. That is a costly procrastination when you’re suddenly ordering pizza for a growing family. If I don’t plan beforehand, there really isn’t time to defrost meat or make sure I have all my ingredients…so I got a few frozen items or really easy-to-make dinners that only take 15 minutes so if I did procrastinate, no one else suffered for it. (I also have those items on my shopping list for every ‘big trip’)

Another thign that comes to mind was that I stopped setting the start time for appts and get togethers based on what worked for the other person and started speaking up honestly about the time I thought I could realistically make it. I was embarrased that it was always a 1/2 hr to 1 later than the time they suggested, but I found we all got along better when I wasn’t saying yes, then making them wait, but showing up at the agreed upon time.

And daily routines. This then this. Tweaking as necessary. Trying again the next day even when I failed. Doing it over and over until I had a sense of how long tasks truly did take me. And also scheduling the procrastinator-type things into the routine. I can’ t stop being a person that likes to read online…but I can make it fit a reasonable portion of my day rather than taking up my entire day. Does that make sense?

I hope something I wrote is helpful to you.

In addition to these strategies, it’s really important to be realistic about how many things you can do in a day, or in a week. It may be (especially if you have some form of ADD) that you can really only do two or three things in a day, based on your energy level and your ability to focus.

Don’t feel like you have to compete with these super-Moms who do eight or ten things every day - just do what you can manage, and do them well. If you can only handle something on the weekend for your kids, that’s fine - one sport that takes place on Saturday mornings, and the rest of the week free to have dinner at home, hang out, do homework, help with chores, and watch a bit of TV - no big deal. They aren’t going to suffer because they weren’t doing every single activity that they have at the community centre, every single night of the week.

 

[TheRealJuliane]

Is it connected with being somewhat slow in the mind? I’m a peculiar example of someone who can be slow mentally (in a cognitive sense, i.e. whatever gets to me) despite above average intelligence (especially when you use good old culturally unfair tests with words and numbers instead of the sickening Mensa geometry).

It is not mental slowness. Yes, that can be ADHD. It takes a lot of effort to learn something, much more than other people seem to exert, but once you learn something, it is yours forever, right?

Do you find yourself reading a page in a book more than once? That’s very probably ADHD.

 

[chevalier]

It is not mental slowness. Yes, that can be ADHD. It takes a lot of effort to learn something, much more than other people seem to exert, but once you learn something, it is yours forever, right?

That’s actually hard to assess. As a kid, I generally didn’t need to study at all until I was 10 or 11 (I’m not talking grades since I didn’t go to school in the US). I think I’ve never learnt how to do so as a result. I was regarded as a genius kid until more or less that point, after which I dropped to just a smart kid level, which possibly made me bitter and unmotivated. I could still read all the books in the summer and then avoid studying before tests etc. for the most part except certain subjects (and those were difficult to learn no matter what), including maths (where I excelled when I was allowed my pace and my method, as opposed to the teacher’s only truth). I still landed some flying colours, including finishing above the straight A point every now and then but it wasn’t the same. In highschool, I actually managed to drop below the school’s average the first year and had a lot of trouble with certain subjects. I bounced back after a while, after I sank in more comfortably, got the gist of the rules of the house, and established some proper relationships with the teachers, noting some success and destroying the final exam (it was way above straight A, although I had been a slightly above B student). At university, I was the type that preferred oral examinations, used people skills to get better grades etc., still managed to land a final A despite being a B student in general most of the time (the thesis provided much of the GPA and my countless electives brought a harvest), and enter the Ph.D. programme, so I guess I’ve had a couple of occasional come-backs. Still, I just can’t read a huge course-book and be prepared to answer questions about stupid irrelevant minutiae that the examiner is asking for no good reason other than making the test difficult.

Also, I generally take issue with the way tasks are formulated and the formulation of a question (or of the answer required of me) often gives me more trouble than the subject matter itself (e.g. I’m currently litigation my bar admission exam on these grounds, they botched the grammar/syntax and the logical make-up of the sentences and made me useless for these couple of questions). I’ve had this problem all my life basically, and I can always point out what was wrong with the question.

And yeah, once I do get it in my head, it’s pretty much mine forever (not exactly forever, as I’ve just begun to note; I’ve forgotten a lot since my teenage years and I’m 28 now). Of late, I have trouble learning from books or courses but easily learn things by just doing them. For example, I’ve learnt a lot of programming this way, while I’m sure I wouldn’t be doing great in a real programming class. With law, I learn more when I do my research for litigation than I did from books at school. I remember I only learnt Latin declinations and conjugations well when I began to teach it. Perhaps a lot can be explained by just investing my time and effort, which is supposed to bring some yields but I remain poor at computer games, which have been my choice of entertainment for years now and I’ve spent countless hours on them, yet people log a third of my hours and are better, people I teach to play overlap me easily etc.

Do you find yourself reading a page in a book more than once? That’s very probably ADHD.

Yeah, I do. Even a very engaging thriller. I get the thrill, I feel the right emotions, my mood responds to the events but I don’t remember a thing, so I go back and quiz myself afterwards. This is puzzling, I didn’t have the same problem as a kid unless maybe with particularly forbidding, ugly coursebooks written in hermetic language.

 

[jmcrae]

Still, I just can’t read a huge course-book and be prepared to answer questions about stupid irrelevant minutiae that the examiner is asking for no good reason other than making the test difficult.

You don’t actually read the entire thing - that’s far too time consuming. What you do is you read the headlines, and the first and last paragraph in each chapter. That’s where the important information is. The rest is just reinforcement and anecdote, but unless you’re reading a chapter a day for the whole school year (and who does that?) there’s no way you’re going to read every word of the course book.

When studying, have a pen and a pad of paper with you, and just jot down everything that seems important.

After that, go through your notes and rewrite them, eliminating everything that you already know.

If you have time, go through them a third time, again eliminating everything that you already know (in other words, only write down the information that you don’t already know) - at a certain point in the process you should be able to reduce the whole thing to one easy-to-remember page of notes - memorize that, and you’ll get at least a “B” on the exam, assuming it’s a knowledge test.

Also, I generally take issue with the way tasks are formulated and the formulation of a question (or of the answer required of me) often gives me more trouble than the subject matter itself (e.g. I’m currently litigation my bar admission exam on these grounds, they botched the grammar/syntax and the logical make-up of the sentences and made me useless for these couple of questions). I’ve had this problem all my life basically, and I can always point out what was wrong with the question.

There’s not much you can do about bad questions - if you can’t figure out what they’re asking you, simply write an anecdote of your own that includes the main topic words in the question. (For example, if the question is, “Train A is traveling at 90 mph and train B is traveling at 60 mph,” but they forget to tell you where they are traveling and in which direction, simply answer by telling a story about one time when you were on a train and it was going 90 mph at one point, but then 60 mph at another point, and you arrived at your destination half an hour late; therefore, the answer to the question is, “30 minutes late.”

You’ll get half marks for that, which is better than nothing.

 

[Bezant]

That’s actually hard to assess. As a kid, I generally didn’t need to study at all until I was 10 or 11 (I’m not talking grades since I didn’t go to school in the US). I think I’ve never learnt how to do so as a result.

I think I possibly have a similar issue; ever since I could remember in school I would take notes, but hardly ever read them. It’s the same reason I think I struggle to keep a day planner as even when my schedule is overwhelming and even when I write things down I rarely look at them–so I have a tendency to procrastinate, like the OP, but I do finish things on time. Much of learning comes from the positive action, I think, as you pointed out.

Maths and to an extent chemistry were the only subjects I seriously needed to study in high school, and though I was average in maths and it wasn’t too difficult if I took my time. Any exam, really, isn’t too difficult for me even if I don’t know the content well and even if phrased strangely–as long as there’s enough time.

 

[chevalier]

You don’t actually read the entire thing - that’s far too time consuming. What you do is you read the headlines, and the first and last paragraph in each chapter. That’s where the important information is. The rest is just reinforcement and anecdote, but unless you’re reading a chapter a day for the whole school year (and who does that?) there’s no way you’re going to read every word of the course book.

I don’t ever read a coursebook during the school year unless I explicitly need to do so in order to avoid failing a test. Otherwise no force will compel me. Used to be different. As for novels, I read the whole thing but remember nothing and need to read the last couple of paragraphs anew to get it in my head.

When studying, have a pen and a pad of paper with you, and just jot down everything that seems important.

Yeah, I always make notes that I never revisit.

If you have time, go through them a third time, again eliminating everything that you already know (in other words, only write down the information that you don’t already know) - at a certain point in the process you should be able to reduce the whole thing to one easy-to-remember page of notes - memorize that, and you’ll get at least a “B” on the exam, assuming it’s a knowledge test.

Thanks. I can manage a course exam, I have a problem when it’s something horribly voluminous, like spanning several years of material and possibly several subjects within a broader field, and asking questions about idiotically irrelevant specialised details that any sensible person would double-check in any real work and are not relevant to anything material anyway.

There’s not much you can do about bad questions - if you can’t figure out what they’re asking you, simply write an anecdote of your own that includes the main topic words in the question. (For example, if the question is, “Train A is traveling at 90 mph and train B is traveling at 60 mph,” but they forget to tell you where they are traveling and in which direction, simply answer by telling a story about one time when you were on a train and it was going 90 mph at one point, but then 60 mph at another point, and you arrived at your destination half an hour late; therefore, the answer to the question is, “30 minutes late.”

You’ll get half marks for that, which is better than nothing.

Thanks, though I honestly feel much more natural litigating the darn thing till I hit a wall and then litigating further.

 

[jmcrae]

I don’t ever read a coursebook during the school year unless I explicitly need to do so in order to avoid failing a test. Otherwise no force will compel me. Used to be different. As for novels, I read the whole thing but remember nothing and need to read the last couple of paragraphs anew to get it in my head.

I’m the same way, and my attention span is getting worse as I age; not better - I’m going to be one of these little old ladies who is constantly introducing herself to people she already met five minutes ago, and forgetting whether it’s breakfast time or supper time.

Yeah, I always make notes that I never revisit.

In my case, it’s the act of making the notes that plants the information into my head - I also never re-read them, because the act of writing them helps me remember them.

Thanks. I can manage a course exam, I have a problem when it’s something horribly voluminous, like spanning several years of material and possibly several subjects within a broader field, and asking questions about idiotically irrelevant specialised details that any sensible person would double-check in any real work and are not relevant to anything material anyway.

I’ve noticed - and at some point I’m going to make a study, since I work with students a lot - that the things expected of people at school, and the things expected of workers, are almost polar opposites. For example, there is “no cheating” allowed - that is, you are not allowed to collaborate with others to seek out the correct answer, or rely on other people’s talents to succeed on a project. In the working world, this is absolutely essential, and you will be labeled “not a team player” if you try to do everything on your own - you have to include others, and you have to take advantage of other people’s expertise. But we are so trained after how many years of school not to do that, that you actually have to re-learn how to do it. (If we all went straight into the working world right after kindergarten, where we learned to share and take turns, then we’d at least have that skill, if no others.)

Thanks, though I honestly feel much more natural litigating the darn thing till I hit a wall and then litigating further.

I like that idea, too. Go for it!