Warm and lovely May, or more like final exams and thesis period, am I right, fellow students? We’ve all been there – it is springtime, deadlines are approaching, and all you want is to go outside and enjoy the lovely weather with your friends. Instead of that, you tell yourself that you need to study, selflessly refuse all social plans that you’re being invited to, lock yourself in the misery of your home, and then end up scrolling on TikTok the whole day, while also feeling anxious and guilty. You end up procrastinating all day without writing a word, and tell yourself that tomorrow you will start for sure. Guess what? Tomorrow the cycle repeats.
If you haven’t recognized yourself in the description above, I want to quote a viral sound on TikTok that says “How does it feel to live my dream?!”. You probably are fine on your own and do not need any extra tips and tricks to make yourself more productive, which is amazing! If you do recognize yourself, first of all, you are not alone! It is extremely common for students to struggle with procrastination, especially on big complicated projects. And we are thinking that the thesis is the most important project of our student-hood, which makes it even more scary and anxiety-inducing. I believe that the very first step in dealing with the problem of procrastination should be an attempt not to blame yourself, but to treat yourself with attention and compassion. A lot of factors can go into procrastination, from impostor syndrome to psychological burnout, and by blaming ourselves we are not more likely to get the work done. So, after we have recognized that procrastination is not a mere sign of laziness, after we made ourselves believe that we are the most amazing and capable students in the world, we need to find the ways of how to help our amazing hard-working selves be a bit more structured and get more work done. I’ve put together some tips to do just that in this blog post.
You probably already know basic organisation and productivity tips such as decluttering your space, turning off your phone and breaking down big tasks into small actionable steps. But here are some of the tips that are less well known, and a bit more advanced. They are designed to trick your brain into enjoying your work more and getting more done. Personally, I use all of them and can say that they worked very well for me. Interested? Read along!
You might have heard about Pomodoro technique, which is when you set up a timer for 25-30 minutes, work during this time with no distractions strictly on one task, and then make a mandatory 5-10 minute break. Every 4 “pomodoros” or 25-minute study sessions you take a long break for 20 minutes. While it works very well for some folks, others critique this system for a lack of flexibility. Indeed, sometimes you catch a deep focus on your task and then you can concentrate for much longer than just 25 minutes, and sometimes you need more than 5 minutes for a break.
The “Flowmodoro” technique is like an advanced version of Pomodoro, that addresses all of its drawbacks. It goes as following: when you start studying you turn on a timer on your phone and work as long as you can. When you notice yourself distracting, you turn off the timer and see how much you worked. If it is only 5 minutes, then it’s also a result, no judgement here! Then, you divide the time that you worked by 5 and that will be your time for break. So, if you worked for 5 minutes, you will have a 1 minute break. If you worked for 50 minutes without distractions you can have a 10 minute break. As opposed to classical Pomodoro, this technique helps you to be more aware of your natural attention span and you can get an idea of when you can be the most productive. Maybe, you will notice that you can hold your focus better right after you wake up in the morning, or maybe it is after a short exercise!
You can call it a progress journal or a praise journal. No, it doesn’t have to do anything with God and prayers, here we will be praising only ourselves! Contrary to common belief, research shows that we are less likely to achieve our goals if we make it public. It works in a way that if you publicly announce your goals it makes you feel as if you’ve already accomplished them. So my advice here is not to make your goal public, just make sure to write down your progress every day. You can do it writing in a journal by hand, or create a private Instagram page or small blog specifically for that. I personally had a private Telegram channel called “Help Dasha find motivation”, where every day I posted an update on how many pages of essays I wrote, or how many articles for them I read :). You can add a few close friends to your blog or even make it public and encourage your subscribers to send you fire emojis after every post if that will motivate you better.
This technique is based on the assumption that small wins are the best motivators. If you set yourself a goal to post a message with your progress for a day every day at 8 in the evening, you will be more likely to at least make some effort just to praise yourself later and post about that. So the most important thing here: make sure to stay positive in your journal! See the difference: “I wrote only one page today, so disappointing” and “I wrote a whole page today!”. Treat every progress as a small win and it will make you feel better about work in general, which is extremely helpful in the long run.
Talking about making yourself feel more positive about doing work in general as a key to success, this next tip comes from one psychologist that I knew, and it also works very well combined with the previous one! You break the goal into small tasks and create a list of small rewards as long as the number of your tasks. So if you break “write a thesis” into 20 steps, you need to come up with 20 rewards. Get creative! Rewards should be something that excites you, it can be a walk for a coffee to your favourite coffee shop, an episode of your favourite show or a warm bath. One reward should be something special, maybe it’s buying yourself a new outfit or going on a short trip. Then that’s where the trick comes: you range the rewards from your least enjoyable to that ultimate special best one. Then, after you complete the first task on the list you reward yourself with the first reward, the one that is at the bottom, and make your way to the top, so that with the last task fulfilled you get the ultimate best reward. It would work best if you repeat every day for at least 14 days. It works because it tricks your brain into thinking that after hard work you will be getting positive emotions, which in the long run will help you start the tasks easier.
You can integrate it with the previous tip and include all rewards in your journal, so that you write down not only what you’ve accomplished in a day, but also how you’ve awarded yourself for that. Yes, it looks like you are training yourself to enjoy studying like a Pavlov dog, but what wouldn’t we do to meet all those deadlines, am I right?
Habit stacking is a technique that will be helpful not only with studying, but in other aspects of life, where you are trying to build new habits, be it meditation or exercising. It works the following way: you connect the new habit to the old habit that you already have. For example, if you want to start working on your thesis consistently every day but have a hard time allocating time for it, you can try connecting it with the other habit that you are doing every day. It can be something like brushing teeth or eating breakfast. You can tell yourself that from now on, right after you brush your teeth you need to open your computer and work on your thesis for an hour (or for as long as you can with Flowmodoro technique!). This way, brushing your teeth will become a trigger for this new habit and it will be harder to find excuses to slack off until the evening.
Habit stacking was described in a bestselling book Atomic Habits by James Clear. If you are into self-help literature you have probably already heard about it. If you have not, I would highly recommend reading it to anyone interested in productivity and habit-building in general.
If you don’t feel like incorporating any of the complicated techniques, I absolutely understand! For a lot of people it may seem even more time consuming, than just studying. So for those folks I decided to add my most listened to music to listen to while studying:
- lofi hip hop radio – beats to relax/study to – a famous never ending 24/7 stream with animated girl with music for studying. It has a very supporting comment section as well as its own community online with features from discord chat to merch.
- Abao in Tokyo study sessions – aesthetically pleasing videos with music, timers and breaks that make you feel like you’re studying with someone else
- Dark Academia | Distant Thunderstorms & Fireplace – one of my favourite videos to put in the background while studying, it has no timers or breaks, but makes you feel like you are in an old library and about to uncover a new mystery.
- S T U D Y T I M E – a playlist with changing melodies if you don’t like repetitive lofi beats, but they are still not enough to distract you and allow you to have a deep focus on your work.
- Soft Murmur – a free online tool to create your own sound mixes to help you stay focused
All in all, I want to send words of encouragement to everyone finishing their thesis right now. It is a crazy time, but we will all get through this! Stay consistent and practice compassion towards yourself, and I am sure you will be successful.
All pictures are courtesy of the author.
