We all know that feeling: the deadline is tomorrow, the screen is blank, and suddenly cleaning your room seems urgent. We have all been there.
In this post, I’m sharing 3 simple tricks that genuinely helped me stop procrastinating — not just once, but consistently. They’re based on psychology, habit research, and trial-and-error from real student life.
🚀 Trick 1: The 5-Minute Rule
“If a task takes less than 5 minutes, do it immediately.”
This trick comes from productivity psychology and works especially well when you feel overwhelmed. But even better — you can flip it:
👉 Tell yourself you’ll just work on a task for 5 minutes. No pressure to finish it.
Most of the time, once you start, you keep going. It lowers the barrier to entry and helps you break that freeze mode.
How to Use the 5-Minute Rule
- Pick a Task: What have you been putting off for too long?
- Set a Timer: Five minutes, no more, no less.
- Start Small: Just start, don’t focus on finishing.
- Decide to Continue or Stop: If five minutes is all you can give, that’s okay. If you want to keep going, even better.
⏱️ Trick 2: Set a 10-Minute Timer
This is a variation of the Pomodoro Technique — a time management method where you work in focused intervals (usually 25 minutes), followed by short breaks.
If 25 minutes sounds too much, try just 10. Set a timer, put your phone in another room, and start. It feels achievable — and again, you often continue once you begin.
Are you interested in finding out more about the pomodoro technique? Well then my next blog post is for you, where I will go into detail of some techniques.
💡 Trick 3: Change Your Environment
Our brains connect spaces with habits. If you always lie in bed with your laptop, your brain associates it with sleep or relaxation, not work.
Try this:
- Going to a café or library
- Clearing your desk and lighting a candle (even small rituals help)
- Studying at a friend’s place
- Studying at the kitchen table instead of your desk
This technique also aligns with what James Clear shares in Atomic Habits: your environment often shapes your behaviour more than motivation does. We mentally assign our habits to the locations in which they occur. If you feel like you are stuck, try go to a different location and build a new realtionship with the environment there.
🧠 Why These Tricks Work
Each of these techniques addresses the mental resistance behind procrastination:
- Trick 1 lowers pressure and gets you started
- Trick 2 creates focus
- Trick 3 interrupts your default “lazy” cues
They’re small, low-effort changes — but sometimes that’s all you need to break the cycle. These small changes are what James Clear (Atomic Habits) calls “essential”, as over time they lead to big changes in our behaviour.
💬 Let’s Talk
👉 Which trick are you going to try today? Or do you have your own anti-procrastination hack? Share it in the commentsection below.
Links & Sources
- Atomic Habits – James Clear
- The Pomodoro Technique
- The five-Minute Rule
Hey Fabienne, I love the 5-Minute Rule, if a task takes less than 5 minutes, do it immediately. I usually orientate myself at it. But I never heard about the other way around, to just work on a task for 5 minutes and having no pressure to finish it. I’ll try it out on a next time!
thank you for your insights Géraldine, let me know how it works out for you 🙂
I’m a big fan of the 10-minute timer – it is the best way to tidy up the flat✨ I feel much less stressed when everything is in its place – and this method has helped me to be consistently organized at home when everything else isn’t at some times