Ah, procrastination. Raise your hand if you have ever engaged in this pleasurable activity. Good. I hope you are reading this in a lecture, and everyone is staring at you.

What you might not know about procrastination is that it is a valuable survival trait. I had my first inklings about procrastination's value when I found myself co-writing a Nexus feature article about this time last year, entitled "How to Bullshit Your Way Through Uni" - a topic I was particularly well positioned to write about. We decided to interview a few staff members about the origins of procrastination in the psyche. What they had to say about the subject was surprising. Apparently procrastination is not only a habit universal to humans, which we had already suspected; animals do it too.

Lab rats, we were told, would put off an activity for as long as possible if they could. Why this happens isn’t strictly known, but it’s surmised that it could be an energy saving trait – if you put off something until it actually needs doing, you’ll have saved precious energy in the process.

Of course, in today’s relatively luxurious world, this behaviour leads to earning average marks at Uni and slowly growing to resemble a beached sea mammal of some kind. So, to maximise your good health, we’re presenting a number of techniques, both sensible and not, to inflate your productive output without spending any more hours, thus increasing your goof-off time.

Learn To Read Faster

The main cause of crappy reading is either a learning disability like dyslexia (which, if you have one, can be helped – see a doctor for details) or doing a thing called subvocalisation as you read. If it’s the latter, it can be very easily fixed. Subvocalisation is, simply, when you read at the same speed you talk, because you’re “saying” the words to yourself in your head as you go. You may even mutter as you read. This is very common, and very easy to fix.

There are a number of tricks you can do to remove this habit. One method is to read and re-read the same page over and over, forcing yourself to go over every word. As you do so you may notice that as the exercise becomes more boring, you stop needing to subvocalise. Once established, the “trick” of speed-reading is easier to establish. Another method is to continuously mouth the vowels of the alphabet to yourself as you read – “aeoiu, aeiou,” over and over. This (probably) has the effect of disassociating the “speech” bit of your brain from the part that does the reading, thus eliminating subvocalisation. If you’ve ever had trouble reading, or even wished you could get thorough your paper readings that much faster, this technique may really help you.

Take your Breakfast to Uni

Sitting down to eat your breakfast is a giant waste of time. If you’re eating cereal, toast, or similar, it can be munched as you walk, or sit at a computer while checking your email (your own computer, though – you don’t want to crumb all over someone else’s.) Liquidised breakfasts are fantastically efficient, if you can stomach putting your Weetbix, milk and bananas in a blender. Ultimately, you can take a delicious breakfast into a lecture with you even if it’s in a bowl. Sure, people might frown or pass comment, but that’s only because they didn’t get the 15 extra minutes sleep that you did. Which brings us to…

Get More Sleep

I get insomnia, so I like to think I know about this one. Sleep is important. If you don’t get enough, you tend to feel terrible, dizzy and lightheaded. Get too much of not enough, and you can hallucinate, become unconscious, have seizures, and (ultimately) die. Getting no sleep can actually kill you faster than getting no food can. It’s also a big player in the memory game. The better you sleep, the more likely you are to remember things. This is, as you may have guessed, important when you study.

By far the biggest factor in getting to sleep, if it’s something you tend to have trouble doing, is a thing called “sleep hygiene.” Erratic habits before bed, like irregular bedtimes, tend to throw you off. However, making sure you have a regular pre-bed routine – something that tells your body “oh, we’re going to sleep soon,” can really help.

Of course, the fact that you study may mean your sleep is erratic from necessity. In this case, a finding from Harvard Medical School may help you. It’s been known for a long time that we have a “sleep switch” in our circadian rhythm triggered by light. It’s just been found that we have a second “sleep switch,” which is activated by food – or, more accurately, lack of it.

All you have to do is not eat for around 12-16 hours before the time you wish to set as “morning.” Once you eat for the first time after this period, your body clock sets this time (regardless of what the time actually is) as “morning,” and you’ll find yourself naturally getting sleepy about 12 or so hours later. Handy after an all nighter or when jetlagged, if you can resist the siren song of takeaways.

Learn to touch-type

This is one of those incremental time-savers that will ultimately add up to a year to your life.* The fact is, if your job has anything to do with computers, the wasted seconds from hunting and pecking with two fingers add up. Don’t bother paying money for a touch-typing course, if you are tempted to learn. Simply do the following.

1. Find a computer. Put your fingers on these keys: ASDF and JKL;. You’ll notice the “F” and “J” keys have bumps on them. These are so your index fingers know where to live. They are your home keys.
2. Start typing whatever, without looking at the keyboard. DON’T YOU DARE LOOK. This will be incredibly frustrating at first, but if you stick at it, you will get there.
3. When in doubt, return to your home keys. Then start again.

The best time to learn touch-typing is not with a programme on the internet or anthing like that; it’s when you have a big ol’ assignment to do and have no choice but to sit banging out chunks of text for hours. So do it, and by then end of the assignment you’ll have the hang of it. You’ll thank yourself. And us.

*Maybe

Develop Subroutines

Programmers will be all over this, but even if you don’t know your C++ from your final grades then you should be aware that grouping things well can improve your efficiency. Instead of lumping all of the random tasks you have to do into the “when I have free time” category, try breaking them up and making small routines during your week. Have a weekly assignment, household chore, or column to do that always ends up being a last-minute affair? Slot it in between other scheduled activities, like classes. If you’ve got an hour break between two classes and an otherwise free day, instead of pissing around or going home why not use that hour to hit the campus green or the library and get something done? If you’re have coffee or drinks with friends on campus a bit, find a time when it’s before or after a class for everyone. The more things you have in a schedule, the less you’ll be juggling and the less you are juggling, the less you’ll drop. If you have large time commitments, line up something more relaxing to do during your break, or if you’re the kind of person who likes to sit down and power through work then utilise that mindset to get other stuff done (of a completely different nature) and take your mind off the subject for a while.

Don’t Be Messy

Every professional procrastinator knows the pleasure of tidying their room or organising their notes before they start doing work. It’s a killer. The fact is that there’s a part of your brain that gets a real kick out of creating order from chaos, so it’s a very appealing activity to engage yourself in as opposed to doing work, because you still get a sense of reward from doing it.

If you want to avoid this, keep things tidy so that there’s nothing to distract you when it’s time to work. A place for everything, and everything in its place.

Don’t Take It Too Far

If you overreach yourself, you will fail. Rigidly planning everything out and ruthlessly maximising your schedule eventually take its toll. You can’t expect to strictly define your relaxation time with everything eventually falling to pieces on you, unless you are a robot (in which case please contact Nexus because we need someone to do some typing). Keep some backup time handy in case you get distracted by something important and really need to fit a few hours of staring into space into your week. Can you believe how obvious all this advice is? The fact is it’s really easy to lose sight of the bigger picture the more you focus on things. It’s embarrassing how much of this advice I’m giving out that I don’t utilise myself.

Cast Your Mouses Middle-button Into The Pits Of Hell

Randomly browsing the internet really is a ridiculous time-sink. Keep it short. Opening endless tabs from Digg, Wikipedia, or TVTropes will destroy your idle moments when you are meant to be typing about something. Firefox has a couple of apps that can set alarms or instantly close all of your tabs when they detect you’ve been open-tab browsing for too long. Turn these off when you are doing research.