How to keep away from procrastination?

In a short online survey, to complete a task, some participants were given a one-week deadline, some were given a one-month deadline, and some were given no deadline at all. Turns out, only 5.5% of the people who were given a monthlong deadline responded to the survey, compared with 6.6% of those who were given just a week. Interestingly, members of the last group, i.e. the group who were given no deadline, responded more quickly than those in the other two groups. The conclusion: To keep away from procrastinating, don’t give yourself a long deadline.

A deadline signals the importance and urgency of a task, so not surprisingly, people often interpret a long deadline as permission to delay. Although a long deadline theoretically gives us more time to finish a task, it often means that we postpone it over and over until eventually we forget all about it.

So again, lets summarize. How to keep away from procrastination? By not giving yourself a long deadline. However, this by no means imply that you should never set a deadline. If you didn’t set deadlines for something as complex as preparing an article, you might not be able to prioritize correctly. It all depends on the context!