With Holidays around the corner and wintry weather setting in, the time seems perfect for developing awareness about procrastination.  We all do procrastinate at times. Nevertheless, most of the times the realization that we have been procrastinating settles in after we have delayed past a critical point.  You see, there is a fine line between pacing your time, and procrastination. Where time pacing can be considered a time management strategy, procrastination is always associated with a loss. A loss in quality of work, a missed opportunity, or even extra payments to repeat a semester; but more than anything, the gradual chipping away of self respect and confidence. 

        Developing procrastination awareness is one of the key skills for doctoral students. The awareness helps recognize your behavioral patterns and raises a flag at the onset of procrastination. Taking correcting actions right at the onset can help avoid incurring hefty penalties. Awareness about procrastinating patterns also encourages students to dig deeper into the reasons behind the behavior and address the cause of the problem. This self-diagnostic and analytical attitude also help the future doctors get mentally trained to identify and solve problems at their onset in their professional fields with confidence.
We will be discussing several aspects of procrastination through this month, but to begin with let’s list some basic indicators of the behavior:

1. You keep finding higher priority “commitments” right around the time that you have set up for dissertation writing
2. You feel facing a deluge of sleepiness as you get ready to work on your dissertation
3. You find yourself over indulgent in finding more references than required or revisiting what you have already written with a perfectionist's eye
4. You feel that your mentor and school system has not provided you sufficient support to get the job done
5. You either feel lost or overwhelmed
6. You have spent too many hours going around in circles, instead of making linear progress through your chapters
7. You experience moments of self-pity (I am too tired) or over-confidence (I work best close to the deadline)

        ​These are some of the most common symptoms of procrastination experienced by doctoral students, and each one of these is backed by a psychological rationale. Awareness of these symptoms and their cause can immensely help a doctoral student avoid the dissertation blues syndrome.
Hope this helps initiate a moment of reflection.
Cheers!
Dr. K

​     Since 2015, November is also being observed as the National Gratitude Month and I think it is the perfect month to observe gratitude. For all of us who like to set up yearly goals (please see that I did not say plan) November is a month of realization. Around this time we realize that the year is coming to an end sooner than we thought and that we have much work left to be done on our goals. For some of us, this scenario is a Déjà vu accompanied with a slight sense of failure and fatigue, but yet again the holiday spirit helps us catch the second wind, which typically lasts until the 15th of January of the following year.  The good news is that there is a way to break this pattern, through learning to practice gratitude.
From the perspective of a strategic interventionist, I view gratitude as a learn-able trait.  A trait so strong, that it can alone shift your paradigm from struggling to masterfully steering towards achieving your goals.