How to Stop Procrastinating! :)

Pain, procrastination and pomodoros



If you have ever noticed yourself staring into space and wondering how long you might have been doing that for (and whether anyone else had noticed), you are probably a novice procrastinator. A seasoned procrastinator would have probably been on YouTube, or baking a cake or buying a latte or texting a friend… you get the picture. Whichever you are, understanding the science behind procrastination may help you break the habit.

We are creatures of habit, and procrastination is just another habit. To form a habit, you need four ingredients: a cue, the response to the cue, a reward from the response and a belief that props up the other three.

For example the cue that will pull me away from today's work plan might be a pop-up message on my computer screen, a text message, a feeling of emptiness in my tummy, a distracting thought about another task that I haven't done and so on. Essentially the cue is a powerful distraction of one kind or another.

My Response to the Cue would be to read the message, text a reply, buy a hot cross bun or faff around with my list of priorities. And I'm off. Once I make this kind of response, I may as well write off the next few hours as lost to procrastination. Why? Because the reward that results from my response is the instant feeling of relief that I get when I turn my attention away from work (even though this feeling is temporary).

This relief has a neurobiological basis – research shows that a neuromodulator called dopamine is released in brain – which produces a short-lived feeling of wellbeing. Repeating this cycle of cue, response and reward can lead to a sort of addiction – in effect, I am rewarding myself for avoiding the tasks I have set myself. No surprise then, that a belief quickly follows: I work best under pressure, or I'm just not that organised, or I don't respond well to deadlines etc.

As you can see the entire procrastination cycle is driven by discomfort – the thought of the task (and all the anxieties I may have about needing to produce a first-class piece of work, or that I may not be up to the task, or that my tutors will realise I am not as bright as they first thought and so on) – make me uncomfortable. As soon as I begin to detect that discomfort I become an easy target for distraction (and the many excuses that I will then make about why it is better to put off till tomorrow what I promised myself yesterday that I would without fail do today). And away we go, procrastination: 1, my resolve: nil.


That deals with pain and procrastination. Now for the pomodoro technique which, with a very little practice, can hijack the brain's reward centre to work for me instead of against me. There are three simple steps:
1.Turn off all distractions. Find a quiet corner of the library or learning commons, leave your phone in another room, turn off your server.
2.Choose a period of time you think you can work efficiently for, even if it is only 15 minutes, and go through with it.
3.Reward yourself with a five-minute break. Now the reward is linked to tolerating anxiety for a set period of time and to achieving at least 15 minutes of work!

Repeat this enough and you will form a new habit. After four or five pomodoros (strictly pomodori) you can reward yourself with a longer break of say 15 minutes.

Find out more (and why it's called pomodoro) here.

Useful apps:
•The 3 best Pomodoro productivity apps
•Pomodoro timers
•Tomato timer
•Pomodoro timer for Windows 7

Alternatively, try the University's online resource.

Written by Omar Sattaur, Counsellor at the University Counselling Service.

Don't know if it helped yet, have to see how revision this evening goes haha. It was definitely useful to know though


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Hope it's going well/ went well! Good luck in your exams.

So let me get this straight.... You're telling people how to stop procrastinating, while procrastinating on TSR?

I didn't end up revising in the end, I chose to take a shower instead haha
I did revise during my free periods at school today though. Good luck for any uni exams you may have


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