Don't break the chain.

 Lifehacker is so useful.  This particular article popped up on my Recommended Items in Google Reader.  I'm using this idea to help me self-motivate to study for my impending doom, ahem, I mean MCAT exam.  See the details here and here (both at Lifehacker).

 

I've always had a problem with procrastination mostly because it's a vicious cycle.  I have found, in the past, that I'm usually just fine doing things just before they need to be done.  That reinforces the idea that I can slack off until the last minute.  I can't do this here.  The best thing about this productivity hack is that it is totally customizable.  This is usually a year-long thing, but I only really needed it for the following 80 days, and it converts really well to that.  Plus, you can set how much time you want to spend on your activity of choice or you can have multiple calendars for multiple activities that you want to accomplish everyday, like if I were to add exercise, I could print up a separate calendar for that.  As is, my calendar is pretty innocuous so I can add the X's directly to it.

I roughly calculated how many hours I need to study to be successful on the exam and divided that by the number of days remaining until my exam minus vacation days.  I allotted myself a prorated 4 days of vacation as based on a typical 3 weeks of vacation for a year so 4 days of vacation for 80 days (~5.75% of your total time).

And having it just above my computer ensures that I am looking at the thing constantly.

[I hand lettered the words following Brannboll on dafont as a base]