I Procrastinate. And I Need to Deal With It.

Are you dealing with perfectionism?

I'm havin the same. I was avoiding meeting with my friends when I was 8-12 due to social anxiety and other personal and life difficulties and at that time my computer and porn addiction began to rise. I almost had cut them off(I was playing video games for whole day - 16 hours a day at age of 11, damn. Now i'm just surfin internet and reading about pua, self-improvement, and my computer usage is almost zero, when i'm workin.

Use small steps, journal and intemize stuff.

 

Yeah, most people who procrastinate tend to be impulsive.

I'd recomend you studying in neutral place without any distractions. Try meditating. Observe the shit you're doing and cut senseless activities - easy to say, hard to do, but good luck. Turnoff the phone, don't check the mail/fb/insta every hour, if there's nothing new or important.

 

What may be happening for you is that once something becomes an obligation or a requirement you no longer have any passion, drive or interest in doing it. Make it compulsory and there goes whatever motivation you might have had to start with. If you were given the subject matter to study of your own volition and because it is a class you are deeply interested in, I wonder if you might behave differently? I know I sure do and I look forward to a day of learning. Also don't forget to plan and picture where you are going in life and see how this class fits into your overall life goals. What you may learn from this class may be distinct from what is on the syllabus.

In my mind, schedules and deadlines don't really motivate me and instead create sub-par work or rush jobs. So to get around that I just keep a case list of things that I need to do. I would sign up for a reasonable or even a light class workload and look at when everything is due ahead of time. Most teachers and classes actually give students plenty of time to complete their work. It might help you to study the concept of spaced repetition and also do some soul searching on what motivates you in life. Another trick is that you may not have good study habits but are deluding yourself into thinking you do. If you constantly have tons of negative emotions about studying, I'd say you are probably going about it all wrong. Learning and enriching your life should be an interesting and fun thing you do.

By learning about how to learn, you can rewrite your mental wiring much the same way as you do when you reboot here. The topic is effective thinking and it is simply not taught to most students in school. You may need to go out of your way and solve the problem of procrastination and study habits before you move forward.

Also make sure that your class work is challenging enough for you. If it is not, you can always extend the material significantly. Doing that can often get you an easy A in a class when the teacher sees you go the extra mile. Also setting a goals that are well beyond the minimum syllabus requirements makes it more likely that you will at least get through the syllabus. It is a mental trick that works.

 

Thanks for the reply. It is great to see that you have solid knowledge of the many tools that are out there. Anki may very well be a decent implementation of spaced repetition. I looked at it for language learning alongside supermemo a couple of years ago. I tend to create my own algorithm (really more heuristics) for most projects since it gives me pure flexibility. I was lucky in that my first college subject was physics and we were taught early on how to learn with little to no memorization. It made everything more interesting knowing we only had to know a few tricky equations for each exam. The rest we would have the confidence to solve on the spot (it didn't always go down like that but that is the idea anyway).

I can recommend two very simple books that have helped me along the way. One is called Brain Rules:12 Principles for surviving and thriving at work, home and school. What I like about this book is that the author is very careful not to include information on learning that is not strongly backed by science. In short, I trust the info in it. Another book that I liked was called 'Five Methods of Effective Thinking' written by a couple of mathematicians. Together with a few well chosen books on creativity, I was able to piece together a learning model that worked for me on first principles. Biology is a tough nut to crack due to the memorization. I think the 12 brain rules will provide you with relevant ideas there. Specifically interleaving practice may help there along with using many different learning modalities. Elaboration and tieing it to existing knowledge structures (chunks) already in your memory will help to give the terms some meaning beyond rote memorization (this is one place where creativity theory helps).

Whatever you do, I can say that you need to be able to verify before the exam that what you do worked. It doesn't need to be the most efficient technique but you do need a method so that you can tell when you have mastered something. Going into an exam not knowing whether you know the material is scary. It may seem like too much work to teach it to someone, but do what you need to do to get there.

I would also consider posting this type of question on intjforum or one of the intpforums. Even if you are not a believer in MBTI, I think you can find some people on those forums that you can relate to (there are many students and they are mostly highly analytical).

 

MBTI is myers briggs type indicator. You might have seen it once or twice before on psychology discussion boards. Scientifically, from what I understand, it is not valid. However, with the INT personality types you get a bunch of people who love thinking, are very introverted in real life, and typically have some interesting academic perspectives. I am highly introverted so those forums appealed to me directly.

I did like the survival portion of the 12 Brain Rules as well. If I am recalling correctly that is the section where the author establish human dominance (and even discussed the critical role that communication/getting along plays in that reality).

 

To complicate the choices even more, I am a staunch advocate of OneNote over Evernote. The flexibility provided by my OneNote notebook is insane and just what my somewhat scattered mind needs for creative learning. I delete many of my notes as well and can easily scrap large amount of work for the fun of it. OneNote is the first application I used that really nailed the concept of a whiteboard. Sometimes a plain text editor is enough.

Part of the reason we take notes is for the muscle memory of it. Once I know something, I have no problems deleting it permanently. I know I have linked it to something that just won't go away in my brain. I also use a reductionist approach from time to time where I consolidate notes as I learn more. In a sense that is logical. I work from the details right back to F = MA.

 

OneNote has the same problem with tags. I stopped using tags for the same reason. The biggest OneNote benefit for tags is that you can instantly create a summary page of tags no matter where they are. That advantage didn't outweigh the negatives for me though. I want my note taking device to get out of my way (I like that i never need to save notes and that they are always backed up in the cloud). I never need to make decisions about how the notes should be structured. They are just there for me to read over strewn everywhere. I let me brain sort out what is important and create whatever structure it wants as long as it understands at the end of the day. I'll also go off on any tangent I want in a subject if I think it will lead to a powerful idea. Following a strict path has never been my way. It gets very boring to go from step 1-25 in the same order each time. I like mix it up and interleave making it tougher for my brain to grasp the material. But when it finally does understand, it really understands deeply. I am a slow learner, but I found out that if I give it time, it will typically get there (a la Maltz and the teleological servo-mechanism idea from back in the 60's or before)

 

Same here mate! Not finding the energy to do important stuff yet. I don't feel like studying which is most important. Second, I don't train for my goals. Third, I don't feel like going out and socializing. This makes me feel sick man!