Hello, my name is Mehwish. I am a student at Mt. SAC and I am majoring in psychology. This blog is a project that I am doing for my first ever psychology class. For this "Behavior Change Blog", I will design a plan/program that I will follow over the course of my class. What I aim to do with this program is use operant conditioning to modify a specific behavior of mine. I have chosen to change my extreme procrastination habits.
Procrastination gets in the way of a lot of things. One of the things that I avoid doing the most is school, which can be surprising because I am very serious about my schoolwork and grades. All I can say is that I am addicted to putting things off for later. For instance, I have taken several minutes just to type this blog entry up because I am checking my email in another window, while simultaneosly reading. I think I developed my procrastination habits in high school, where most of my classes were online so I did my school work from home. Planning my own schedule + the internet - teachers = HARDCORE PROCRASTINATION. I learned and became an expert at coming up with all sorts of excuses to put things off until the last minute, and sometimes even the last second. Excuses so convincing that I can even convince myself. I am always missing due dates and submitting sloppy work because of having little time to do it. Obviously, procrastinating can be very destructive and that is why I desparately need to change this behavior. But I will really need to work on this project, and for that, I will need your help in motivating me.
Mehwish
I have the same problem! I do my homework online and promise myself i'll only just check my e-mail... But before I know it, it's been an hour wasted. Good luck trying to condition this problem. What steps/methods do you think you'll use?
ReplyDeleteHi, I am very goo at procrastinating too, so it would be very interesting to follow you in your journey trying to change this behavior. I hope you to succeed, and if you do I will probably imitate your program.
ReplyDeleteWhat I've done to stop myself from procrastinating is to set up a number of small goals so like lets just say you have a big essay due in 2 weeks. You could set up a goal to have an outline done in 2 days, a rough draft done in a week, and then the rest of the time revising. It's actually much easier to break things up into smaller goals and then trying to accomplish those goals one at a time rather than one huge seemingly impossibly goal.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of operant conditioning, you could probably set up a reward/punishment system for each goal you accomplish or not.
Good luck!