I am a mess. The combined hours I’ve spent on the Internet while avoiding real work probably outnumber the hours I’ve spent doing almost any other activity in my life. I am physically incapable of producing anything without having first spent at least twice as long running away from it.

Luckily, I know this about myself, so I’ve developed ways to outsmart most time-wasting techniques. Here are five strategies I recommend in order to move beyond procrastination.

1. Turn off your phone.

It’s so easy to convince yourself that as soon as you check the weather/scroll through Facebook/look something up on Google/send that text/etc., you’ll get right back to work. And then there comes the delightful numbing sensation particular to Internet wormholes, and you’re gone.

There are a lot of valid reasons to hesitate about turning your phone off entirely (What if there’s an emergency? What if my mom calls? What if my mom calls about an emergency?), but when you’re on hour 10 of a three-hour project, sacrifices must be made and risks must be taken. Turn off your phone, and the next time you absent-mindedly reach toward it for “a few minutes” of distraction, you’ll have to wait while it wakes up—hopefully enough time for your conscious brain to catch up to the tricks of your subconscious.

2. Work in public.

When you’re surrounded by the game faces of other students, there’s a special kind of shame associated with sneaking a peek at your phone. I recommend the library or a study lounge, but any place that requires you to either work or feel inadequate compared to the people surrounding you—or worse, judged by them—can give you just the kick you need to keep typing past the first sentence. As a bonus, you’re much less likely to fall asleep when you’re upright at a desk instead of lounging on your bed at home.

3. Create an artificial deadline.

If you’re like me, you do absolutely everything the night before it’s due. If the deadline is a week away, there’s just no urgency to it, and you end up taking a nap instead.

In this case, it’s a great idea to give yourself a reason to have the work done early—an unofficial deadline you are just as reluctant to miss as the one on the syllabus. My preferred technique is setting up a meeting with my professor for essay edits, but anything that holds you accountable to another human being and obligates you to produce work for their review is effective. If you don’t have a professor that critiques papers, consider a writing group or a tutor.

Now, when you do your work on the night before it’s “due,” you’ll actually be doing it at minimum several days before the real due date.

4. Have a plan.

If you’re facing down a week of essays, projects, tests, and general misery, you might be feeling too overwhelmed to even begin shoveling some of it off your to-do list, so you freeze instead.

At the beginning of your week from hell, make a list dividing up your work by day. Try to distribute the workload equally and realistically.

Once you’ve made your plan, stick to it. Stop thinking about the big picture (what you need to have done by the end of the week) and start thinking about only the task at hand (what you need to have done by the end of the day). As the saying goes, when faced with an elephant that must be eaten, take one bite at a time.

5. Forgive yourself.

Some days, it’s just not going to happen. And when you’ve spent all day in your pajamas, doing nothing productive despite the aggressive countdown toward academic destruction playing in your head, it’s easy to get frustrated with yourself.

But procrastination, contrary to its reputation, usually has more complicated roots than sheer laziness. We procrastinate because we’re overwhelmed, because we don’t know where to start, and because we’re afraid that whatever we eventually create will never compare to what we hoped to create.

None of that is frivolous or stupid. It is inconvenient, and you’re going to need to conquer it eventually, but it happens. If you have a dead day, accept it as part of the process and move on.

You’re going to get there. This is just a detour.