Time Strategies

For this blog post, I read the articles "The Important Habit of Just Starting" and "11 Ways Unsuccessful People Mismanage Their Time."

Funnily enough, I was procrastinating reading these articles. I kept the tabs open for a few days, despite my goal of finishing all of this class's work far ahead of time. This morning, I told myself 'Okay, you just have to sit down and get started. They'll most likely be interesting enough that you'll want to keep reading. Just. Get. Started.' So I did. And my wise inner self was right about forcing my procrastinating other inner self to hush.

Just starting whatever it is you have to start is often annoying, and it takes a while to get mentally plugged into whatever the task is, but once you do, it's worth it, and you're normally far enough along that you want to keep going. One thing I do to help myself when procrastinating is make a promise to myself to work for 15 minutes. If at the end of that I'm still not motivated, I'll take a mental cue from myself and work on something else until I have the mental energy to come back to the original task. But most of the time, once that 15 minutes is up, I'm in a good headspace for that task, and I want to keep going.

The second article was actually encouraging to me, as I tend to do most of the things it recommends, though of course never perfectly. I learned to do all of these things through trial and error over the course of these last four years at college, although they were all things that my sweet mother tried to teach me before I left home. Like most, though, it took living through my mistakes to really learn those lessons.

Overall, great articles with valuable advice!

I spend pretty much the whole first week of every semester meticulously filling out my planner - something I learned early on in high school! This is me every time I hear one of my friends saying "Nah, I'll remember."