There are 8,766 hours in a year, which is roughly 730 each month, and 168 hours each week.
If we take into consideration what doctors always say and assume that we all sleep for around eight hours a day, that only leaves us with about two-thirds of each week to be productive. Now if you are like most people, you likely will spend a couple of hours watching television each day and the same amount playing games or using social media, which reduces our time left for being productive even more. So we are really only left with a fraction of each day to actually get things done which begs the question of why so many people (myself included) insist on procrastinating getting things done when they need to.
Sure, perhaps there's some truth in saying that we just don't want to do our homework or clean our room so we stall by doing other things, thus is why we procrastinate. However, is that always true? Somewhere in our minds, we know that we are going to have to do whatever the stalled task is at some point, so why do we insist on not doing it until there is very little time left to complete the task, at which point it seems a million times more stressful?
If we are given a term paper due at the end of the semester, most of us hardly think about it until two weeks until it's due when and we still try to do other things in place of the paper. Does our innate desire for immediate pleasure tell us to do something more pleasureful now and worry about the task later? Do we really consider the inevitable mounds of stress produced by not doing something when we know we should worth the remarkably smaller amount of self-pleasure we get from pushing it out of the way? Or do we simply not bother to consider the negative consequences of postponing the task?
Somehow we find a way to make a two-hour task take twelve and we never learn that at the end of it, we have effectively turned out 168 hours in the week to 156 with very little to show for it. It seems illogical that we haven't learned to finish our tasks within a timely manner so we can move onto the next one, but we haven't.
Procrastination is seemingly unavoidable, because compared to the task we need to do, there almost always seems like a more appealing alternative thing to do: watch an old TV show, play your old video game that you've beat a hundred times, read an uninteresting story in the newspaper, or some other unnecessary and counter-productive task. So if there is always a "more appealing" thing to do, how do we put our immediate desires to the side and accomplish the need-to-do task? That is a question so many people struggle with every day, and it isn't easy to answer.
The answer is hard to find because not everyone can do the same thing to end their serial-procrastination spree. For some people, they can simply prioritize in their head (or on paper) what they need to do and commit to that so they get everything done with spare time. Some people are not so lucky and are still stuck procrastinating no matter how hard they try to prioritize their objectives.
If you find yourself in this category, here are some tips to help overcome your procrastination and (hopefully) get everything done and still get to sleep all eight hours every night. Try and reward yourself after each little part of the task, so for example, if you have a large research paper to do, reward yourself each page time you find a good source to use, or complete a page of writing. This starts out as a remarkably challenging way to overcome procrastination, but it gradually becomes easier as you'll condition yourself to do the task so that you reward yourself. If you find it difficult to complete the small portions of the task, you need to commit yourself to these small portions at a time by eliminating outside distractions such as TV, cell phone, the internet, and anything else that you won't need to finish the task. This allows you to essentially make yourself complete small portions of the task before having the opportunity to get distracted. After you complete each portion of the task you should reward yourself, just as I said earlier, to reinforce productivity.
Sure, we will probably never use all 8,766 hours every year productively, even if you disregard sleep, but hopefully we can all be a bit more productive and get a bit more accomplished each day.
