Hurting your health? Make small healthy choices.

Procrastination impacts your health just as much as work. Sleep-deprivation, pushing off doctor visits, rationalizing “oh one day of eating tons of junk food is fine, I’ll do better tomorrow” are all forms of procrastinating your health. 

Choose one area of your health that is a non-negotiable. Pick a simple method that you would be good at turning into a habit. College is infinitely easier to survive when you’re healthy. Have visible checkpoints throughout your day.

Want to get better at eating healthy? Eat a plant at every meal.

Want to get better at exercise? Avoid the elevator and take the stairs every time

Want to sleep better? Use sleepyti.me, a bedtime calculator, and try to sleep at least one cycle earlier. Learn to take naps with your head down on a desk instead of “taking a nap” for 5+ hours when you crash on your bed. 

Endless work sessions? Incentivize your studying.

You normally turn in quality work on-time but you loathe having to do 9+ hour work sessions at once to get it done because you procrastinated. You take a lot of short breaks and end up finishing at midnight instead of 4 hours earlier. Sound familiar?

Rule of thumb: Give yourself an incentive of a LONG break doing something you really want to do. Procrastinators take a lot of short breaks but then realize they spent all those breaks unsatisfied. Long breaks are the answer.

The long break should be 20% of how long you’ve worked. Decide on your break length first, then how long you’re going to work to earn it. Want 45 minutes to sit down and enjoy a show episode? Work 3 hours and 45 minutes for it. 

This eliminates the short work/break cycles that end up amounting to an entire day spent working with breaks that feel disappointing. You don’t want to feel like you worked all that time for no real reward, even if you got good work in on-time.