How To Stop Drinking Coffee At Midnight And Avoid All-Nighters

By Megan Patiry on March 16, 2014

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Researchers note that drinking coffee or any other caffeine-laden drink in the evening, or sometimes even as early as after lunch, can have negative effects on sleeping patterns. “Terrific,” you may say, “I need to pull an all-nighter tonight to finish a paper, so bring on the sleep disruption!”

“Coffee Zombie” by forhaedyn via Flickr.

However, as life-saving as caffeine may be, doesn’t sleeping in (or at least getting more than three hours of sleep) sound just a tad bit better than guzzling java at midnight over a grueling assignment you’ve put off until the last minute? Below shows you how to curb even the most serious procrastination and avoid the dreaded all-nighter.

Something Bad Will Happen

In other words, prepare to stop procrastination in its tracks by implementing a consequence on yourself if you don’t finish your project and/or paper by 5 p.m. the day before it’s due. This tactic, also called negative reinforcement, involves setting a consequence that will incur if you don’t take action. Some common examples of negative reinforcement in daily life involve putting on sunscreen before you head to the beach (so you don’t get burned) and leaving early for work or class (so you don’t get stuck in traffic). Both examples represent how we sometimes structure our lives in order to avoid aversive stimuli, which is, in our case, staying up all night. The solution? Have a consequence for staying up all night.

The key success with this reinforcement is to take it out of your own hands. For example, make a bet with your roommate that you can finish the project before 5 p.m. on the day that it’s due. This eliminates even the idea of staying up late to finish and gets you accustomed to finishing assignments while the sun is still out. Be sure to wager outside of your comfort zone for bets (such as upwards of $50) so you’re motivated to stick with it and not simply pay off the person you’re betting with.

Something Fantastic Will Happen

Perhaps you don’t work well with negative reinforcement, and instead want something positive to look forward to once you successfully avoid an all-nighter. If that’s the case, then there’s a piece of cheesecake (or other treat) waiting in the fridge with your name on it.

You can also utilize the same roommate tactic used in the negative reinforcement section, but instead turn the bet into a positive. For example, if you successfully avoid an all-nighter, your roommate will agree to treat you to cheesecake at your favorite restaurant. If not, you get no cheesecake, and have to use negative reinforcement next time (i.e. you end up buying your grinning roommate cheesecake, get no cheesecake yourself, and watch he or she eat it in a state of bliss while you’re still half-asleep from the night before). If that’s not motivation enough, I suggest you fast for a day beforehand, then look at pictures of cheesecake and ask yourself how motivated you feel on a scale of 1-craving.

Off With The Legs

Oftentimes the reason procrastination takes hold in the first place is due to the seemingly enormous size of a project, which we’ll call a Giant. Rather than try to face a Giant head on, we end up trying to sidestep it until we’re backed into a corner with no other choice but to charge it at full speed with no regards to our well-being. However, this can simply be avoided by cutting off the legs of the Giant long before it backs us into the corner.

This usually involves finding the base “legs” of your project (the part of it that everything else relies on, such as sources) and getting it out of the way as quickly as possible. This translates into getting into the library, discovering sources, bookmarking/highlighting them, and putting them into a works cited, references or similar format in the span of a few hours or less. Now you have everything you need for information on the topic ready to be cited.

Then, once this is done, delegate two hours of another day that week to the next piece of the project, or the “torso” of the Giant. Work your way up, spending no more than 2-3 hours per day and per week of focused, results-oriented work on the project, tackling one aspect at a time. By the last week it’s due, you’re left with the head of the giant (i.e. final edits, a cover page, etc). Breaking projects up into tasks with clear time limits forces you to make the most out of that time without feeling overwhelmed or pressured to slay the Giant in its entirety.

 ”But I Work”

This is entirely understandable, but also one of the main reasons why you should practice cutting the legs off of the Giant. Perhaps you do work the day before the project is due, so the only logical conclusion is to stay up all night and do it, right? Keep in mind that if you only have the head of the Giant left to slay because you already spent 2-3 hours a couple afternoons earlier in the week cutting off the legs and the torso, you’ll realistically only need to spend 1-2 hours the night before the project is due to finish it. The requisite time you have leftover can be spent doing what you want to do and getting restful sleep instead of losing twelve hours and gaining stress.

Pressure

It is common to hear people that “work well under pressure,” cite this as the reason they procrastinate or pull all-nighters. From students to freelancers, this tactic has been used to get down to the bare bones of a project and push through without delay for the simple fact that you have to. Some researchers disagree that procrastinating to work on projects is in any way beneficial, and while that may be true for projects in their entirety, it might not have a good standing against projects that are broken into parts.

According to various studies, our attention spans average from 10 to 15 minutes of fully-focused attention. After this time, our attention begins to wax and wane rapidly, falling ever the more short of focused. This is why, with what I call the Giant principle, I suggest breaking up the project into smaller, manageable parts that require maximum focus in a short amount of time. This appeals to the “better under pressure” worker’s sense of a deadline, as they are self-imposing a maximum of only a couple hours of allotted time to the “legs,” “torso,” etc.

In other words, if you feel you need pressure to finish something, self-impose it. Start working on the legs of your project, say, an hour before you have baseball practice. Tell yourself you will finish the legs within the hour, or you will risk being late to practice. This is just one example, of course, but the idea is to impose consequences, give rewards, and create pressure to complete small parts of the Giant project at a time.

Once these methods start to ingrain themselves as habit, you’ll start to see projects in a different light. The Giant now becomes simply five swings of your blade over the course of three weeks instead of an overbearing entity waiting to be tackled all at once. After all, what most are really searching for when procrastinating is time: time to work, time to play and time to sleep. If this time can be managed effectively, without deprivation or massive stress, you’ve found a strategy worth holding on to.

Not to mention, you’ve possibly saved hundreds of dollars’ worth of lost bets and consumed coffee, and are now full with cheesecake bliss. Bring on the Giants.

Do you have any effective time-management strategies that work for you? Share them below!

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