From Putting Off to Digging In: Beating Procrastination & Getting to Work Sharing Session

On the 18th February 2022, I was kindly invited by the SHBIE GPD Team to share a session in INgIN (GPD monthly talk with SHBIE Research Students) on Friday morning with SHBIE Research students (Masters & PhD) on a topic that I think most of us can relate to doing PhD or academic work - Procrastination. Everyone experiences procrastination, including myself, which I still do now - something that we can never get away with, something that we can control with some amount of willpower and determination.

The sharing session was held at 9 am and ended at around 10ish pm. The procrastination overcoming tips were mostly depicted in Nils Salzgeber's book "Stop Procrastination - A Simple Guide to Hacking Laziness, Building Self Discipline, and Overcoming Procrastination". I loved how simple and practical the advice given in the book was, and it was written persuasively by Nils as if he is currently talking to you and giving you all those inspiring advice at that very moment when you read the book. Honestly, after reading Nils's book, I feel inspired, and the words keep playing in my head every time 'my monkey self' starts to kick in.

I started the presentation by eliciting the audience's ideas on the concept of procrastination using Mentimeter. The result showed that the audience often used' delaying' to the term procrastination. The presentation continued with identifying the root cause of our own procrastination and emphasising that to overcome procrastination, one should raise their awareness of this concept, which was highlighted in Nils's book.

The session gave the students six steps to overcome procrastination (Nils wrote more steps to overcome procrastination, but we could only cover six during the session due to the time limit given). I hope that students and colleagues who attended the sharing session can address their procrastination habits. We ended the sharing session with the Padlet exercise where the audience shared their procrastination habits, how would they overcome them and their takeaways from the session. Finally, I urged the audience to read the book by Nils Salzgeber and asked them to write their insights after reading the book in one of the sections in the Padlet. Attached are the slides that I prepared for the presentation and the Padlet activity conducted during the sharing session.

From Putting off to Digging In Slides by Roslynn.pdf

Download PDF • 531KB