Climb Out of the Ditch of Procrastination

School can get overwhelming at times. With assignments from different classes piling up and studying for many tests scheduled each week, it can be difficult for students to find the motivation to actually get some work done. Although it seems that the hardest part of a task is starting it, it can be equally as hard to stay focused long enough to finish it. Fortunately, there are many techniques that can help students dig themselves out of the pit of procrastination, and concentrate on completing their workload.

1. Oftentimes, it is a struggle to find peace in the middle of a busy week. This distress can cloud your mind, and prevent you from working. The app, Simple Habit, can help you clear your thoughts through meditation. Although it can seem like a lot of work to get into meditation, it is quite easy with the app as you can find sessions as short as five minutes. You can find meditation tracks that specialize in helping by using the search bar. For help getting started on an assignment or concentrating on an assignment, you can type the term “focus” in the search bar, and play certain tracks that help you get into a mindset dedicated to concentrating for free.               

2.  Another meditation app that tackles a similar problem as Simple Habit, is Headspace. Although to fully unlock Headspace you have to pay a large sum of money, Headspace also has free meditation tracks that can be listened to. Unlike Simple Habit, Headspace does not have such a large variety of specific topics that each meditation can specialize in. However, the beauty of Headspace is that it is simple to use, and it is effective in decluttering the mind, despite the limited collection of meditation recordings the app has in its free mode.

3.  It can be hard to start an assignment when there are a lot of other tasks that also need to be finished. Crafting a plan to chunk up your workload is important, but it may seem tough to rank importance on work that needs to be done. However, apps Habit Lineup, allow you to list all the assignments that you need to get done, and set times for when to work on each assignment. The main purpose of Habit Lineup is to motivate you to get work done by approaching each task as a streak. For each time you work on a task, your streak grows. This feature can be used to chunk up large assignments, such as studying for a test or writing an essay. You can schedule a task to be worked on daily, weekly, or monthly. You can also schedule a specific time of the day to work on a specific assignment, and set the app to send notifications to remind you to work on it. Once you are completely finished with the assignment, you can delete it off your habit list. This app does push you to get work done as you want your streak to grow every day, and it also allows you to check your statistics to see how true you are to your goal.

4.  Although some assignments may not be as enjoyable as other assignments, they still need to be done. However, sometimes these tasks may be so boring that you can have trouble focusing. Luckily, the app Tide offers calming sounds that specialize in helping you focus. These sounds are dubbed ocean, rain, and muse. The tracks offered are calming, and cancel out any background noises, helping you focus on the task at hand. In addition, the app also offers setting timers on each sound you chose. It is automatically set at a 25-minute timer, but you can change the amount of time to best suit your studying needs. Using the timer can help notify you of when to take a break. Working for an appropriate amount of time, and taking a quick break, can be a good way to fight distractions, and get things done faster.

Hopefully, by using these apps, you will find yourself out of the ditch of procrastination, and a bit more focused on the work that is to come.