Planning vs Procrastinating: How to Avoid Confusing the Two
Hello everybody,
I’m a planner by nature, and I’m writing this for all the other planners out there because up until recently I have been a very bad one, and here’s why.
I write lists, it’s just how I am. I write to-do lists daily to make sure I can get enough done in a given day so I can go to sleep satisfied. Here is what my average to-do list used to look like:
Monday
* Wake up, eat breakfast, go to class.
* Attend class X.
* Write notes, eat lunch.
* Attend class Y
* Study until dinner, do readings, prepare for tutorials.
* Plan out task Z
A pretty ugly list, isn’t it? This was the basic format my to-do lists took in my first semester, and I was wracking my brains over why my grades were unsatisfactory and I could never seem to get anything done. Then it hit me, my lists are terrible.
My lists were too vague
Study? Write notes? About what? Actually, I myself wasn’t even sure and therein lies the problem. My goals were undefined, so the time that I allocated to completing the task was actually spent trying to figure out what the task was and how I was supposed to do it.
My lists were unstructured
Do readings? Prepare for tutorials? In what order? How long should each task take? Again, I myself wasn’t even sure. My lists gave no indication as to which tasks were more important. As a result, the things I needed to get done, remained unfinished.
So what did I do about it?
After my first semester I realised that my lists were sub-par and had to be fixed. I did my research, turned my daily goals into S.M.A.R.T goals etc. I made all the tweaks necessary to turn me into a productivity machine, so here is what my lists turned into:
Monday
8:30 — 9:30 Wake up, eat breakfast and head to class.
9:30 — 11:15 Attend class X.
11:30 — 12:30 Grab lunch and head to the library.
12:30 — 2:30 Add to lecture notes from Class X, read chapter 5 for class Y, prepare answers to Tuesday’s tutorial.
2:30 — 4:15 Attend class Y.
4:15 — 7:00 Read Chapter 4 for Class X, Review Chapter 3 for Class Y’s Midterm
7:00–8:00 Eat Dinner
8:00–10:00 Plan out task Z, figure out what to do for project A
This list is looking a lot better, the times are clearly marked out and my goals are more achievable and are starting to look realistic. What I’ve just outlined is extremely simple and any productivity guru worth his salt could turn the first list into the second. As a result of these simple changes my grades improved but now I was faced with a new problem. How do I stop deferring my hobbies and interests?
All throughout the day I’d be ticking off my goals, doing my work and trying to keep up with my assigned reading. But by the time I finished dinner I was always exhausted, leaving me little to no energy to finish the last tasks on my list. The last tasks were always related to hobbies or projects I wanted to work on. Then it hit me what I was doing wrong, I was fooling myself. What I thought was planning was actually procrastination.
I usually write my lists either the night before or in the morning, after I’ve freshened up. When I write my lists I always think to myself: handle schoolwork first then you can work on your hobbies. So I’ll usually write down:
*Plan out task Z.
*Figure out what to do for project A.
After writing those two things down on my to-do list I’d get a small hit of dopamine. Enough to convince me that I had accomplished something, when all I actually did was just plan to make a plan. Then by the time I got to the end of the day I was either too tired, or I felt that I had already made progress towards my goals by merely thinking about planning them.
So that is the crux of my advice, I put my goals off for way too long because I confused planning with procrastination. Don’t ever plan to make a plan because you’re just lying to yourself and wasting time in the process. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, get planning out of the way as soon as possible so you can actually make progress on what matters.
I hope this advice can help other people like me out there. Since I’m a planner by nature I tend to overestimate the importance of proper planning so many of my projects never get off the ground. Just schedule an hour or two and get planning out of the way so you know what direction to take. Schoolwork can wait an hour, try build a basic idea of what you need to do, start making progress, and work it out as you go along. Don’t ever plan to make a plan or you’ll be stuck in productivity limbo like I was.