Hey,College procrastinators! Stop killing time!

  Have you ever decided to go shopping with your friends while you know that you have a five page single spaced Physics paper due in two days which you haven’t even started writing? Have you ever spent two hours on YouTube videos while you have an online math quiz needed to be done in one hour? Have you ever danced at a party at 2:00am while you need to read a 20 page essay for tomorrow’s philosophy class and you just finished reading the first page? This is procrastination. Procrastination is a long-lasted and unresolved issue in college education and it needs to be solved today!

  In order to solve this problem, we need to know why and how it happens. Usually college procrastinators do not really notice that what they are doing is procrastination. You might say, “I know I should do my homework first, but I just want to go out with my friends. I know I am being lazy.” However, knowing that you are being lazy does not necessarily mean you know it is procrastination. According to the article Why Procrastinators Procrastinate,“For a real procrastinator, procrastination isn't optional -- it's something they don't know how to not do.” The reason this happens is that procrastinators mind plans things differently. In the article, the writer used some visuals to explain what is happening inside a non-procrastinator and a procrastinator’s heads when they are making a plan. A non-procrastinator makes decisions rely on his or her rationality. However, when a procrastinator tried to make a rational plan, his or her mind will be driven by the instant gratification which makes it impossible for him or her to do the work. Therefore, college procrastinators will end up writing their paper at three o’clock in the morning and turn the paper in at the last minute. How to control the instant gratification is important in order to prevent procrastination. There is also another possible reason: according to the statistics of our online survey, “Eighty percents people chose that they often or sometimes put off things until the last minutes. “Don’t know how to start” is the reasons that make most people procrastinate”. The author of the article Stop Procrastinating … Now Amy Gallo, who is a contributing editor at Harvard Business Review also states that When you lack the necessary knowledge of how to start a job, you are more likely to avoid it”.Therefore, How to control the instant gratification and knowing how to start is important in order to prevent procrastination.

  College procrastinators need to know how to plan their time with rationality instead of instant gratification. Amy Gallo provides some suggestions to procrastinators:
  Do
Identify which tasks you are most likely to put off
Use deadlines to motivate you to get things down within a certain timeframe
Reward yourself for reaching milestones
   Don’t
Call yourself a procrastinator as if it is an intrinsic part of who you are
Tackle arduous tasks on your own — ask others to help you get over the hump
Try to finish a project in one sitting — break it down into smaller, achievable chunks 

   Those solutions mentioned above are certainly useful. However, they are kind of general. We would like to introduce some more specific solutions to the specific group — college students. The solution is: using time managing Apps!

 Here is a list of several Apps which might be useful for you:




-The Homework App
  This App allows you to write down the due date for all the homework you have and classify them by the subject. After you create homework tasks, they will show on the welcome screen with time line, so, you will know how many tasks you have and how much time you have left on each task.



-Forest
  This is a really interesting App. It is basically a timer. Every seed represents thirty minute. You can add as many seeds as you want in a task depends on how long you need to finish your homework. Once you hit "plant", you are not allowed to turn off this App (open other apps), until the time is up. When the is up, you will get a virtual tree for every thirty minute you spend. If you turn off the app during the time you set,  you will get a dead virtual tree. It is fun to see how many trees you planted after you finish your homework.







-Pomodoro One
  This App is a little similar to Forest. It also works as a timer. However, it is an automatic timer. As what is shown on the screen shot on the left, the 25 minutes is the “working time”. The App will remind you Every 25 minutes, and automatically start a 5 minute timer which is the “break time”. This makes you force yourself to work more efficiently.


By Yanjun Hao

Feb.22.2015



                                                           Work Cited 
Gallo, Amy. "Stop Procrastinating...Now." Harvard Business Review. N.p., 11 Oct. 2011. Web. 14 Feb.   2015.

Urban, Tim. "Why Procrastinators Procrastinate." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 1 Feb. 2014. Web. 14 Feb. 2015.

Are you a procrastinator. Interview. Interviewed by Xiaohan Zhao, Siyu Wang. 2015. Web.

Survey Statistic Analysis

By Xiaohan Zhao

  We decided to do a survey among Drexel students about procrastination. We designed ten questions composed of eight multiple choices and two open questions. We sent the survey through the internet and got forty of them filled in. There are only two people out of forty think that they are not procrastinators, so everyone else considers themselves a procrastinator in some degrees. Eighty percents people chose that they often or sometimes put off things until the last minutes. “Don’t know how to start” and “being lazy” are the reasons that make most people procrastinate. Twenty out of forty people start their homework one to two days before the deadline. About eight people start homework at that day or three to seven days before the deadline. About ninety percents people think that they could have better homework quality if they have more time. For the open questions, most people wrote they were entertaining such as watching TV or playing cell phones instead of doing their homework. The result of the last questions, which is have you ever try to solve this problem, is very interesting. Only half of the people said yes, and they know how doing it such as set a calender. Those people said no to this question because they do not know how to make it works.

Annotated Bibliography for "Hey, College procrastinators! Stop Killing Time!

Annotated Bibliography

Gallo, Amy. "Stop Procrastinating...Now." Harvard Business Review. N.p., 11 Oct. 2011. Web. 14 Feb. 2015.

The author of this article is an experienced writer, contributing editor at Harvard Business Review, and also an adjunct lecturer at Brown University. This article mainly discusses on what causes us to delay our tasks and how to overcome these habits. According to Ned Hallowell, delaying work often relates to how busy we are. Because of this human tend to dodge things that they don’t like. It is also said by Teresa Amabile that people procrastinate because they fear the difficulty of the task given. Among the tips to prevent these bad habits is to figure out what’s holding us back. Setting up our own deadlines would also help in motivating us. Other than that, we could increase the rewards for ourselves after completing a certain ask. Involving others are also another form where we can collaborate with others to prevent ourselves from pulling back. Lastly, making this good thing a habit. Maintaining this positivity can progress into meaningful work. This is a good article for our project as it 

Urban, Tim. "Why Procrastinators Procrastinate." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 1 Feb. 2014. Web. 14 Feb. 2015.

The author is a writer and an artist for waitbutwhy.com. He also posts entries at Huffington Post. This article discusses and illustrates a certain view on how procrastinator minds works. Since the author loves to draw in his entries, he showed a drawing of what is going on in a procrastinators head and vice versa. In everyone’s brain, there is a ‘Rational Decision-Maker’. However, in a procrastinator’s brain, there is an ‘Instant Gratification Monkey’ coexisting with it. The decision maker tends to think about long-term stuff and its future. While the monkey only thinks about the present, ignoring past lessons and disregarding the future. The monkey only wants to maximize the pleasure of the current moment. The author also illustrated ‘The Dark Playground’, a place where leisure activities happen at times they shouldn’t supposed to be happening. However, as the time of deadline approaches, there comes ‘The Panic Monster’, which the monkey fears. As the monkey flees, this is where humans manage to do their last-minute work in a matter of time before it’s due. It may be completed, however, it is unpleasant and the result may vary. This article is interesting as it provides illustrative graphics for our research.

Opar, Alisa. "Why We Procrastinate." Nautilus. Nautilus, 16 Jan. 2014. Web.

The author is an article editor at Audubon Magazine and graduated at The School of Journalism at Columbia University. In the article, Derek Parfit, a British philosopher stated that humans are not a consistent identity moving through time. This shows that we are a chain of successive selves, evolving from each subsequent one. This shows that we see our future selves as strangers. The future is unknown to us. So the disconnected link between our present and time-shifted selves have real implications on how we make decisions. If we choose to procrastinate, we will let some other version of our self to deal with the problem. Same as in the present we may derive pleasure, and ignore our future self to pay the price. However, strengthening the connection of these may prove to be an effective remedy. Anne Wilson manipulated people’s perception of time by presenting timelines that are scaled to make an upcoming event. Using a longer timeline makes people more connected with their future selves. This article is informative for our project as it provides psychological evidence on how we think of ourselves and solutions towards it.