The Forums › Forums › Tools, Techniques & Treatments › Motivation/Staying on Track › Helping students to complete their work prior to night before › Re: Helping students to complete their work prior to night before
This is tricky. I can empathise completely with your student because this has been my working style for always and even as an adult it’s how I work. It is completely exhausting.
When your student goes to university he will be an adult and able to decide for himself about medication.
In the mean time, the only way to make him start his work earlier is to somehow increase his adrenalin and his sense of panic if it doesn’t get done. That sounds crazy I know but without that it’s hard to get motivated.
I read on one of the posts here about short-term gains. It’s something I have started doing and it kind of works – sometimes. But I am taking meds now so not sure if it would work without.
Anyway, I have a backlog of papers to write and if I don’t do them I will lose my job next year. So that should be incentive enough to do them but no – apparently not. So I set myself goals with a treat at the end. So for example, when I have finished 3 of them I am going to buy myself a box set of Harry Potter films and will veg out one weekend. So I can’t see the long term consequences of losing my job but I can look forward to a more immediate treat. I think it might have been caper who recommended a YouTube video that helped.
The idea of doing a bit of work at a time is good for some things but for academic projects it’s hard- or at least I find it hard because I forget stuff easily and spend so long refreshing my memory, even the next day, that it’s easier to do it in one go even if I work all night. It’s easier to work overnight too. Everything is quiet so there are fewer distractions, the tiredness makes my brain focus better on what needs to be done and because it’s last minute, adrenalin keeps me awake.
So, try to incentivise him with short term benefits like a treat if he starts and finishes before a deadline.
I am sure others will give better ideas. Of course everyone is different and he might just respond to breaking the task down to manageable bits and doing 30 mins towards it each day.
REPORT ABUSE