The Real Reason You May Be Avoiding Your College Applications

Why bright, motivated students stall on their applications, and what helps them get unstuck.

Every fall, I watch capable students hit a wall with their college applications. They mean to start. They plan to. And somehow the Common App stays closed for another week.

If that sounds like you, or your teen, you've probably already tried the standard advice: make a schedule, break it into steps, just do it. And you already know it doesn't always work.

What's really going on

Dr. Timothy Pychyl, author of Solving the Procrastination Puzzle, has spent years studying why we put things off. His conclusion is that procrastination has less to do with laziness or poor time management than with how a task makes us feel. We avoid the ones that bring up something uncomfortable. So what you're really avoiding is often the feeling the task stirs up, rather than the work itself.

College applications tend to bring all of that up at once. They're vague (write about yourself... about what, exactly?). They can feel enormously high-stakes, as though your whole future is being weighed. And they're tied up with how you see yourself, which makes every sentence feel heavier than it should. No wonder your desk suddenly needs cleaning.

A few things that help

1. Name the feeling. Finish the sentence: "I'm avoiding this because it makes me feel ___." Bored? Anxious that it won't be good enough? Naming your feeling takes some of the power out of it, because now you're dealing with something specific instead of a vague dread.

2. Start smaller than feels reasonable. Forget writing the essay. Open the document and put down one (possibly) bad sentence on purpose. The task gets easier the moment you turn off your inner critic and let the first line be whatever comes to mind, because it doesn't have to be good. Starting is the hard part, and once you begin, the work usually feels less unpleasant than the dread made it seem.

3. Be kind to yourself about the time you lost. This sounds backwards, but the research is consistent: students who forgive themselves for procrastinating tend to procrastinate less the next time. Self-criticism keeps you stuck. A quick "that afternoon's gone, I'll start now" does more good than an hour (or a week) of guilt.

4. Decide the next step before you need it. "I'll work on it later" almost never turns into actual work, because "later" isn't a plan. Psychologists recommend making an implementation intention, which is really just settling the when and where in advance: "After dinner tonight I'll sit at my desk and write one paragraph." Pre-deciding removes the in-the-moment argument with yourself, helping turn goals into action.

5. Don't wait for the perfect idea. This is where I see students stall most often. They're waiting for an epiphany, the perfect topic that will make the whole essay click, so they hold off. Meanwhile the summer fills up, school starts again, and what could have been a calm July project turns into an overwhelming October one. The idea almost always arrives once you start writing, not while you're waiting to begin.

If you take one thing from this: You don't have to feel ready. You just have to start.

The ideas here draw on the work of Dr. Timothy Pychyl and the Procrastination Research Group. If you'd like to go deeper, his book Solving the Procrastination Puzzle is short, readable, and worth the time, and his site, procrastination.ca, is full of free resources.

Krista Irish is an independent educational consultant in the D.C. area who works with high-achieving students on academics, test prep, and college planning.