Cure for procrastination? How to get work done without living from deadline to deadline?

Question

Is it possible to just get a work assignment and get started without the neurotic game of "what's the deadline" and postponing until you have to start? Does school ruin people because it teaches us to play this game, instead of just shifting priorities (as needed) and then just starting in with good effort when we are handed a new task, rather than playing the time game, which is "Oh, I can postpone until I have to get going"? Does anyone know a way around the "time game" that procrastinators play?

Answer 1

There's an old saying that if you eat a live frog every morning, that's the worst thing you'll have to do all day. It's instructive re: procrastination because when you're working on a project (as you describe above), there are regular deadlines you have to meet, so it helps to set the first goals as the hardest (frog) ones, and once they're complete, the rest will seem easy and relatively enjoyable. It's hard to break the procrastination habit, but after a few weeks of "eating the frog first," you'll find it's less of a problem.

Good luck.