By Anping Huang and Akash Agarwala
One of the biggest mental health issues today is procrastination. It is when you develop a habit of executing necessary actions at the last minute no matter how difficult the task is. According to the American Psychological Association, procrastination affects 15-20% of Adults, and 80 to 90% of high school students. It’s fair to say that we’ve all procrastinated from time to time, but what people don’t often realize is how demoralizing and downright unproductive procrastination really is. At its core, procrastination is a failure of the mind’s decision-making capabilities. A lack of motivation/care for the task causes the perpetrator to delay it until they have no choice but to work on it with the minutes they have left.
So how do we fix it?
There have been numerous scientific studies on methods to fight procrastination, but by far the most effective strategy is the use of a consistent and specific schedule. With the implementation of such a schedule, you don’t need motivation to power through. Instead of an “I’ll do it later” mindset, now you have an “I only have to work on this for a couple minutes” mindset, spreading out the workloads and making the assignment so much less stressful. The “Decrastinator” perfectly captures these strategies and executes them in a very clear and straightforward manner.