Difficulty making a start with the work is one of the most common challenges students report when they first come to us. ‘Once I get going, I’m fine,’ they’ll often say. Beginning is the hardest part.
On the surface, it’s easy to attribute this problem to that old enemy of productivity, procrastination. But procrastination isn’t always the most helpful label, and nor is the complementary problem, lack of motivation — another thing lots of students and parents point to as an explanation. Procrastination generally means wilfully avoiding something you don’t want to do, while lack of motivation describes the absence of a will to do it. Both of these diagnoses present task-initiation challenges as problems of desire.
While a student’s lack of desire to do a task — or indeed desire not to do it — is often part of the picture, it is rarely the whole. Very often a student doesn’t want to do his maths homework on one level, but at the same time will actually have a desire to do it because he knows that he should.
How can we help a student like that act upon his better desires, rather than his in-the-moment aversion to the maths? We need to offer something more than just the encouragement to ‘make yourself do it’.
There are all sorts of reasons why, in the moment, students may have real difficulty just making themselves do it. Very often, having trouble getting started is a symptom of a problem, not the cause. To offer our students real help, it is important to have an understanding of what the root cause is of each student’s task-initiation challenge.
1. Not knowing how to start
If a student has a complex, multi-step task to complete, or multiple competing tasks that all claim to be urgent, the barrier to starting is often not knowing how to. In this situation, the first step of starting needs to be breaking the task, and this may require getting help from the teacher.
Asking for help may not be something the student finds easy — which means that what looked like a procrastination problem was actual signalling a need to develop self-advocacy skills.
2. Overwhelm
This one can look very similar to the first, as it arises in response to multiple or multi-step tasks. However, where barrier (1) was due to the student’s awareness that they had something complex to do, overwhelm can often arise in cases where the task isn’t that complex. The work just seems like a lot, and therefore it’s easier to ignore it!
In this case, the student may need someone to sit down with them and read over, talk through or write out what they have to do. After doing this, you’ll probably hear the remark, ‘this isn’t as bad as I thought!’
3. Perfectionism
We’ve spoken about perfection elsewhere, but it is worth pointing out that this is another case where the reason the student struggles to start is very different from the stereotypical ‘procrastinating because I can’t be bothered’. Where perfectionism is the underlying problem, the student may actually care too much or place too much felt importance on their work.
Perfectionism is a problem with its own set of solutions, so go read more about it here.
4. Time blindness
A task without a deadline is notoriously hard to get done. Deadlines make a task feel real and make completing it feel important. For students who lack an awareness of how much time they have or how long a task will take to do, the deadline itself won’t seem real — until it is right on top of them! These students may look like classic ‘procrastinators’ who rely on cramming things in at the last minute, but the problem will actually be time blindness rather than simply task avoidance.
The key for these students is to learn methods for ‘seeing time’ so that the deadline can become meaningful and the task start to feel real earlier than the night before it is due.
5. Open escape hatches
Every student who encounters a task they don’t particularly enjoy will face this obstacle: a series of open ‘escape hatches’ that scream, ‘jump out here!’. The escape hatch might be picking up the phone, opening up a browser for some internet shopping, quickly checking Insta, logging into a game…all intended to just be for a few minutes, of course.
Our students are constantly surrounded by easy opportunities to ‘escape’ the task in front of them into something else they enjoy. It can then take a huge amount of effort to pull themselves away once they have headed down the escape route, and make starting that task even harder.
To close those escape hatches, students need routines which make the jump into them harder and a more conscious rather than automatic decision. This requires forethought about which escape hatches the individual student tends to fall into, and setting up barriers ahead of time, like putting the phone in another room before sitting down to study.
Does one or more of these challenges apply to your student?
Get in touch today to find out how our coaches can assist your child with task-initiation and other important study and life skills.
