Until sophomore year of college, I was a procrastinator.

That year, as it finally sank in that my mom wasn’t around to knock on my door and ask, “How many pages have you written?”, I realized I needed to break that habit. If I didn’t I’d be doomed to days of suppressed dread followed by nights of panicked writing for the rest of my college career.

I did some reflecting: why did I procrastinate? Mainly, I realized, it was a combination of two things: dreading all the work I had to do, and having no idea where to start.

I discovered Tim Urban’s articles on fighting procrastination on Wait but Why. I loved the amusing images Urban came up with to explain procrastination (I was all too familiar with the Panic Monster). The strategy I picked up from them is rather simple: before starting a project, figure out the steps to finishing that project, and decide when you will do each of them.

As Urban explains, this helps to make the project less “icky.” Which sounds more doable: “Today I will Start Learning To Play A Song,” or “Today I will look up the chords for the song, and figure out which ones I already know and which ones I’ll need to learn”? Figuring out what you are going to do, specifically, makes it more likely that you’ll actually do it instead of putting it off.

That, obviously, solves the “no idea where to start” problem. Less obviously, it solves the “dreading all the work” problem too: by scheduling out what you’re going to do when, you’re also scheduling out periods of procrastination.

Here’s an example of how it works: for the past three semesters, I often had to write papers analyzing works of literature. You could break this down in a couple of ways: each step could be writing about a certain portion of the work (stanza one, stanza two, stanza three...), or each step could be writing a certain amount of your essay. I usually went with option two. Each step was “write one page of my paper”, except the last, which was “write intro and conclusion”.

This meant that, on the day I sat down to do step one of the paper, I didn’t have to have it all figured out. I didn’t have to know what my main idea was, or how the heck I was going to come up with five pages of things to say about this poem. I certainly didn’t have to dread the next five hours of rushing to finish the paper, like I would if I left the whole thing to the last minute because I didn’t know where to start. (Huh, past self?) I just had to write one page.

And once I finished with that one page, I could be done! I had full permission from myself to drop that project and not come back to it until the next day.

You could say I’ve learned how to put off procrastination until later.

The really strange, unexpected part is that sometimes, once I’ve finished the scheduled piece of a project, I actually keep going! After all, I know what I have to do next. I’m on an accomplishment high. And with permission to not do it right now, the stubborn kid in my head doesn’t feel like she has to object, “But I don’t wannaaa...”

Of course, most of the time, once I’m done, I’m done. And that works out, too. Procrastination is so much less guilt-inducing when it’s all part of the plan.