Surviving Procrastination in Grad School
If there’s one thing that can up-end your thesis and cause you to miss deadlines, it’s procrastination. Procrastination is a frustrating yet inevitable part of the thesis writing process that can diminish your productivity and force you to write everything at the last possible moment.
This problem can compromise the quality of your thesis and affect your grade. Fortunately, there are several ways to beat procrastination and help you prepare a great thesis report. Read on as we discuss some procrastination management tips and how you can seek help from a thesis editing service.
Break Down Your Work Into Clear Goals
Simply telling yourself that you have to write your thesis can be vague and leaves plenty of room for procrastination. What you need are some clear goals to help you break down this monumental task into something more achievable. Here are some goals you can consider to make things easier:
• Schedule a meeting with your thesis advisor
• Draft an introduction
• Complete literature review
• Collect data
• Complete the methodology
• Run your results
• Complete the thesis draft
When you break down the thesis writing process into smaller milestones, you are less likely to procrastinate and can be more productive.
Organize Your Work With Checklists
Here’s another procrastination management tip that can help you: consider using digital or manual tools to organize your work. You can prepare checklists and track the progress of your thesis by outlining the status of each task. This could be:
• To-do
• In Progress
• Completed
• Under Review
• Revisions Required
This method is particularly helpful because it gives you a sense of accomplishment every time you complete a task. Moreover, if you are busy procrastinating and cannot start on a new task, you can tackle something that’s already in progress or requires review. An ongoing task would require less effort, and you’d be more motivated to complete it.
Use the Pomodoro Technique To Improve Productivity
When it comes to thesis writing, you can write non-stop for three days straight or take a break for two weeks. This approach can be ineffective. It prevents you from using your time property and poses the risk of missed deadlines or submitting poor quality work.
The Pomodoro technique can serve as an effective antidote to this problem. This time management technique requires you to work in short bursts of 25 minutes and take 5-minute breaks in between. You can take a longer break of 15 to 20 minutes after 4 pomodoros.
The biggest benefit of the Pomodoro method is that it helps you cut back on interruptions. When you are procrastinating, you might be compelled to focus more on other tasks such as calling back a peer, answering emails, etc. The Pomodoro method encourages you to leave these tasks for the 5-minute break you plan to take after each 25-minute interval. It also helps you determine the amount of effort required for a particular activity and accordingly invest your time.
Hold Yourself Accountable to Someone
Thesis writing is a prolonged process, and there may be periods where you lose your motivation entirely and get distracted by other tasks. Having an accountability partner who can monitor your progress can be useful here. You can get someone you trust to regularly ask for updates on your progress. Typically, a thesis advisor plays this role, but it will help to have a personal backup.
The best system here is to work with someone who also needs an accountability partner. This way, you can keep each other motivated and check on each other. Having an accountability partner also means that you have someone you can share your struggles and celebrate your victories with.
Remember to Reward Yourself
Everybody likes to be appreciated for completing a difficult task. It also helps with bolstering your motivation. So, every time you complete a milestone in your thesis writing journey, be sure to take a break and reward yourself. You could treat yourself to a nice meal, play your favorite video game, or go out with your friends. The idea that there’s a reward waiting for you at the end of a complicated task can help keep your procrastination to a minimum. You can figure out what you like and which rewards would motivate you the most and work accordingly.
Use a Professional Proofreader/Editor
Writing a thesis is an uphill task, but editing and proofreading it? That’s a whole other challenge. The good news is that you don’t have to do this on your own. Instead, you can seek help from professional editing services that can review your thesis and pinpoint inaccuracies, fix grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, and improve sentence structure.
If you need help proofreading or editing your thesis, reach out to edit911 today and get the help you need. We have a team of experts who can take over the arduous task of editing and proofreading your thesis. You won’t have to worry about procrastination anymore and can get a professional to spruce up your work!
