Page 125 - A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

You have an important goal each day: to jot a few brief notes into your planner-
journal for the next day, and a few checkmarks (hopefully) on your current day’s
accomplishments.
Of course, your life may not lend itself to a schedule with breaks and leisure
time. You may be running on fumes with two jobs and too many classes. But
however your life is going, try to squeeze a little break time in.
It’s important to transform distant deadlines into daily ones. Attack

them bit by bit. Big tasks need to be translated into smaller ones that show up on
your daily task list. The only way to walk a journey of a thousand miles is to
take one step at a time.

NOW YOU TRY!

Planning for Success
Pick a small portion of a task you have been avoiding. Plan where and when you will
tackle that portion of the task. Will you go to the library in the afternoon, leaving your cell
phone on airplane mode? Will you go into a different room in your house tomorrow
evening, leaving your laptop behind and writing by hand to get a start? Whatever you
decide, just planning how you will implement what you need to do makes it far more likely
that you will succeed in the task. 12

You may be so used to procrastination and guilt as motivators that it is hard to
bring yourself to believe that another system could work. More than that, it may
take you a while to figure out how to properly budget your time because you’ve
never before had the luxury of knowing how much time it takes to do a good job
without rushing. Chronic procrastinators, as it turns out, tend to see each act of
procrastination as a unique, unusual act, a “just this one time” phenomenon that
won’t be repeated again. Even though it isn’t true, it sounds great—so great that

you will believe it again and again, because without your planner-journal, there’s
nothing to counter your thoughts. As Chico Marx once said, “Who you gonna
believe, me or your own eyes?”

AVOIDING PROCRASTINATION—INSIGHTS FROM INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING
STUDENT JONATHON MCCORMICK