currently, i'm in a bad rut and dealing with social anxiety on top of the lasting effects of my poor time management skills and procrastination.

for as long as i can remember, i've had a bad habit of procrastinating. i've never been able to shake it, only learn to deal with it and work around it. it's not cutting it anymore. because of this, i have bad time management skills and often i'll be working on school assignments late into the night and lose sleep because of it. my grades are now dropping, and so is my quality of life. my stress is causing borderline depression, and it's making my anxiety worse.

i don't know what to do anymore besides doing what i already do, i.e. planning, writing things down, etc. i'd also like to mention that i'm addicted to the computer and it's hard to be away from it at home. i also get distracted easily. nevertheless, i would really like some tips or advice for dealing with this sort of problem. thanks.

I'm a major procrastinator with the attention span of a 4 year old during a sugar high and I find that it helps a lot to work in small blocks (1-2 hours max at a time) and to reward myself at the end of it. If I have a paper to write, I'll write as much as I can for 2 hours, then stop, watch an episode of a TV show I'm behind on or just generally browse around on the internet, and then start working again. If it's calculations/programming, I'll set a goal of the number of problems/lines of code that I need to get done before I can do something fun. That way, I do my work in a reasonable amount of time and I also fool myself into feeling like I'm just having fun and not actually working lol. I also spend time convincing myself that the earlier I get something done, the more time I have later to do whatever the heck I want, whether it's watch TV, read a book, or sleep.

I put the pro in procrastinate, and I know the frustration. My eventual goal is to get back to where I make doing what I need to do a habit (by forcing myself into it every day until it is) so it's automatic and comes easily. Until then, timers are great. I'll set a timer and say "ok I'm going to do this and nothing else for 15 minutes, that's not so bad," and then stuff gets done piece by piece.

Since starting university, I've fixed my procrastination. I will not watch TV, use the computer, play games, go out with friends, etc, until everything that has been assigned [not due soon, but assigned at all] has been completed. It really helped, I now do things immediately :)