Stopping Procrastination: High Standards & Trusting Yourself
In our last newsletter, we introduced some of the underlying causes of procrastination and how students can break down tasks into smaller chunks for success. Working towards that success is a common trigger for procrastination. Oftentimes, the pressure on students to get good grades and succeed creates an underlying fear of failure and not being able to meet the high expectations that have been set for them and by them. Building confidence and trust in one’s self are important steps to avoid procrastination and help students improve as they work.
SEPARATING SELF-WORTH FROM ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE
In order to overcome procrastination, students must be aware of what causes and factors are keeping them from starting their work. Self-awareness is an important skill for personal development and improvement, as well as for increasing productivity and academic success. Reading our newsletter, checking out additional resources, and thinking about procrastination are key steps to take away its power and make it easier to complete tasks.
Heightened self-awareness around the false perception that “Performance = Ability = Self-Worth (PAW)” can help students to separate these distinct categories and recognize that they are not dependent on one another.
Here’s how a common procrastinatory chain of events might work with these concepts:
Students feel pressure to get an A on a project, which leads to doubts about their ability to get an A. These doubts create hesitancy to start the project due to a fear of not succeeding on the project. In this case, starting and failing is worse than failing because they didn’t start at all. In the former, they failed because they are a failure. In the latter, they failed because they misused their time. It moves the failure from a personal level to an external failure and protects their self-image.
Unfortunately, this chain is far too common for many students and leads to higher levels of stress and a further association between performance, ability, and self-worth. Students set incredibly high standards for themselves, which is often a core reason for their success, but a fear to live up to these standards can hinder their success. Once students can separate their self-worth and abilities from their performance, they can begin to be more proactive about ending procrastination.
Working through these psychological processes is difficult, especially when they have become consistent habits. The high standards students set should be goals that require consistent improvement to attain, but they should not be roadblocks for getting projects done.
Here are our recommendations for working through these challenges and putting procrastination in the rearview mirror:
Start and adapt: When writing a paper, we rarely turn in the first draft. We know it's there to get our ideas down and that we will adapt and modify it. Treat starting any project the same way: it’s the draft! Keep those high standards in mind for the final product and adapt as you get there.
The 5-Minute Miracle Technique: Looking at a project you need to complete, ask yourself, “How can I spend 5 minutes to move this project further along?” Commit yourself to the 5 minutes of work – this could be drafting thesis statement ideas for an essay, making flashcards, or starting a study guide. Psychological studies have shown that you’re more likely to finish a project once you start it, and getting started is often the hardest part.
Set approach goals: While we’ve covered the go-to framework for setting goals in previous newsletters, looking more deeply at the language we use in setting goals can help us to work through procrastination behavior. Set approach goals over avoidance goals, which essentially means setting goals for what you hope to accomplish rather than what you want to avoid. Think about the goals you have set for yourself: Is your goal to score a 92 or is your goal to not score below 90? These may seem very similar but they make our brain look at tasks quite differently. Approach goals are motivating and mission-driven while avoidance goals focus on stress.
Gratitude list: Spend 5 minutes writing down a list of the important people in your life that you love and are grateful for. After you finish, go back over the list and consider how many of those people would love you any less after a bad quiz score. We’re pretty confident that number will be really close to 0. Remember this! Our self-worth as a person isn’t attached to our performance or ability!
Student and Parent Action:
This week, students and parents have the same homework. Watch Nic Voge, Senior Associate Director of the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning at Princeton, discuss “Self Worth Theory: The Key to Understanding and Overcoming Procrastination.”
FURTHER READING AND RESOURCES:
“How to Overcome Your Fear of Failure.” Harvard Business Review: Susan Peppercorn offers various techniques for tackling failure head-on to help individuals succeed in all areas of life.
“How College Students Can Avoid Procrastinating with Online Work.” Ohio State University: This article was written with college students in mind, but the same principles apply to high schoolers. Emphasis is placed on creating a suitable learning environment, which includes physical space, mindset, and the people/tools we surround ourselves with.