If you've spent even a short amount of time with me, you've probably noticed stand-out thing about my personality. Is it my charm? My wit? My intelligence? HA! If you noticed any of those things, feel free to tell me. What I'm actually referring to is my unparalleled ability to procrastinate. No, seriously. If procrastination were a sport in the Olympics, they'd have to call the whole thing off because I would beat everyone by such a wide margin.
Procrastination is actually really frustrating and impedes my ability to think and work properly. Every time I sit down and say "Ok, I'm going to work now," my brain does otherwise. I usually end up pulling out my phone and checking Instagram or watching a YouTube video. "Oh, it'll just be 5 minutes. I can spare 5 minutes, right?" Well, those 5 minutes turn into 10, then 20, 30...you get the picture. With this mindset, I end up twiddling away precious time that I could be using to be, say, productive. Unfortunately, this leads to sleep deprivation and subsequent grouchiness in the morning, which then prevents me from doing work. It's a positive feedback loop, and a dangerous one at that.
So, how do I get out of this vicious cycle? How do I force myself to sit down and crank out everything I need to do in a timely manner? The truth is that I don't really know. I haven't found a way to drag myself out of it yet. I know that I should probably put my phone downstairs when I'm doing homework, or at least leave it where it can't be seen by my wandering eyes. The flaw in that logic is that oftentimes I need my phone to do homework. I can't very well leave it downstairs when I need it.
My solution at this point is to just find a more productive workspace. I find that whenever I go to the library, I'm far more productive than if I were at home. Maybe because there are other people around, maybe because I just like it there. Who knows, really. Unfortunately though, I'm not able to go to the library everyday, so I have to find a way to simulate that environment in my own home, but that's a project for another time.
Good luck to my fellow procrastinators out there, and my apologies that I couldn't provide better advice. I'll leave you all with this: find a space that makes you feel like doing work, and try to stay there until you finish.