Page 94 - A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

Harnessing Your Habits (Your “Zombies”) to Help You

In this section, we’re going to get into the specifics of harnessing your zombie
powers of habit to help you avoid procrastination while minimizing your use of
willpower. You don’t want to do a full-scale change of old habits. You just want

to overwrite parts of them and develop a few new ones. The trick to overwriting
a habit is to look for the pressure point—your reaction to a cue. The only place
you need to apply willpower is to change your reaction to the cue.
To understand that, it helps to go back through the four components of habit
and reanalyze them from the perspective of procrastination.

1. The Cue: Recognize what launches you into your zombie,
procrastination mode. Cues usually fall into one of the following

categories: location, time, how you feel, reactions to other people, or
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something that just happened. Do you look something up on the web
and then find yourself web surfing? Does a text message disturb your
reverie, taking you ten minutes to get back into the flow of things even
when you try to keep yourself on task? The issue with procrastination is
that because it’s an automatic habit, you are often unaware that you
have begun to procrastinate.

Students often find that developing new cues, such as starting
homework as soon as they get home from school or right after their first
break from class, are helpful. As procrastination expert Piers Steel,
author of The Procrastination Equation, points out, “If you protect your
routine, eventually it will protect you.” 3

You can prevent the most damaging cues by shutting off your cell phone or
keeping yourself away from the Internet for brief periods of time, as when you

are working on homework during a twenty-five-minute study session. Freshman
actuarial student Yusra Hasan likes to give her phone and laptop to her sister to
“watch over,” which is doubly clever because a public commitment to study is
made in the very act of removing temptation. Friends and family can be helpful
if you enlist them.