How to Avoid Procrastinating as a Student

Procrastination and visualisation are habits. The more you do one, the stronger it grows. It’s a matter of consciously making the right decision to not procrastinate so that your willpower can grow stronger.

Something I came up with a few years ago was the +1 -3 rule.

This rule is the idea of when you do something, for example, go to the gym, your willpower gets a score of +1. If you imagine your willpower starting with a score of 0, and you go to the gym, your willpower will have a score of 1. So that, next time, it’s that +1 more likely that you’ll say yes to doing that task.

You go to the gym, great, you’re getting results of going to the gym, you’re getting stronger, but it’s your willpower that’s also getting stronger. In fact, +1 stronger because you said yes to going to the gym.

Because the next day is easier than the last, because you now have a willpower of +1, let’s say you go to the gym 5 days in a row. Your willpower is now +5. Yeehaw!

But, what happens when you wake up on the 6th morning and say, I’m too sore to workout today. I’m not going to go to the gym?

Well, you don’t get the result of going to the gym, you’re not going to get any stronger physically. And, in fact, your willpower weakens. But, your willpower score doesn’t go down by 1. It goes down by 3.

Hence why it’s the +1, -3 rule.

Because you made the decision not to go to the gym, your willpower score is reduced by 3. So it was +5, but now it’s only +2. Your willpower is weaker for the next day. Sure it’s still positive, it’s at +2, but what happens when you start to miss multiple days in a row at the gym?

Your willpower will drop, and drop and drop until you no longer have the motivation to go to the gym.

In other words, it’s compounding.

It’s the rule around habit building. That’s why it’s usually difficult to start a habit, starting with a score of 0. But, When you stay consistent, it becomes easier and easier to do that task. When you miss a day, sure, it won’t have a huge impact, but miss consecutive days and the effects compound. Until you miss enough days that you start to drop off and the habit is broken.

My point here is that to make a change in your life, to implement a new habit, it requires consistency.

Bringing this back to architecture school and procrastination, procrastinating and visualising are habits.

That’s why it becomes so hard to break the habit of procrastination, since you’ve built up this willpower that could be -300 from all those times you decided to procrastinate.

From now on, by consciously saying no to procrastination, the next time you’re thinking about procrastinating, it’ll be a little bit easier to make the right choice, since after saying no once, your willpower is now only -299. Yayyy.

But over time, that’ll soon become -200, -100, 0, and then it gets easier and easier to say no to procrastination. You just need to stay consistent.

Don’t forget that the cure is to visualise your future to keep it in the back of your mind. This will assist you in saying no to procrastination.

Have a vivid goal that can pull you.

If you don’t have a vision of the future, it’s as if you’ve got all your architecture work, and you’re trying to push it. That’s a lot of hard work.

When you have that vision in the back of your mind, it’s like the work is pulling you. That’s a lot easier than pushing it.

Through visualisation, you’ll have solved both the problems of procrastination. Firstly being that you’ll enjoy the work you’re doing because you have that end goal in the back of your mind. It fires you up and keeps you motivated.

Secondly, it makes it a whole lot easier to put your head down and work, because you’re not fearing that you’re missing out on something else. You know what you want, so nothing else has any meaning.

There’s no more FOMO, no feeling like you’re missing out on something because you know what you want, now you just need to work for it.