Carry a long project to the end

Learning to Learn · Learning to Learn · ages 16-18

Name ______________________ Date ____________

What goes in a decision log entry?
- Mood, weather, and lunch
- Date, decision, reason, and alternatives dropped
- Praise for yourself
What makes a working question good?
- One sentence you could answer with evidence
- A vague wish for a great grade
- Three questions stapled together
Procrastination is simple laziness with no emotional cause.
Circle one: True False
The next task feels huge and scary, so you keep dodging it. What breaks the spiral?
- Add five more tasks beside it
- Wait for motivation to strike
- Shrink the next step until starting feels silly to refuse
Your three-month build keeps slipping. What protects the calendar?
- Vague phases with no dates
- Dated chunks with visible outputs plus buffer weeks
- No schedule at all
What do you do in the flat middle stretch, when nothing feels urgent?
- Run the weekly review of done, next, and blocked
- Pause everything until the deadline looms
- Rewrite the title page daily
Mia keeps re-arguing settled choices with herself each week. Which habit ends the loop?
- A louder inner debate
- A decision log with dates, reasons, and dropped alternatives
- Deleting all notes
Zed polishes his introduction for the sixth week while research sits untouched. What attitude would finish his project?
- Progress, not perfection, so ship a rough draft early
- Perfection first, research later
- New fonts until inspiration lands

Answer key

For grown-ups. Fold this page away before handing over the rest.

Date, decision, reason, and alternatives dropped · Written reasons beat memory. Past-you stops needing re-arguing when the record holds the why.
One sentence you could answer with evidence · Narrow until the method is obvious, yet wide enough to matter. Answerability with evidence is the test.
False · False. It is mood repair: dodging a boring, hard, or scary feeling, which then charges interest in stress.
Shrink the next step until starting feels silly to refuse · Tiny starts slip past the dread. Motivation follows motion here, never leads it.
Dated chunks with visible outputs plus buffer weeks · Visible outputs show slippage early, and buffers absorb it. Vagueness only hides the drift.
Run the weekly review of done, next, and blocked · Small steady motion beats heroic catch ups. The review keeps next actions visible when urgency cannot.
A decision log with dates, reasons, and dropped alternatives · Written reasons settle arguments once. Memory reopens them weekly, so the log is what holds the line.
Progress, not perfection, so ship a rough draft early · Early rough drafts invite steering feedback. Polishing one page hides the stalled middle from its owner.