We all think we know how to manage our schedule. It seems we are well aware of procrastination and how to fight it; it’s just *name the reason you still procrastinate*. In reality, we won’t be able to win the battle against procrastination without an excellent time management system. Here are four quadrants for you to learn how to manage your time and finally start writing that term paper.

The first quadrant (Q1) is about critical situations. It’s something crucial that needs to be done right on time, and you just cannot delay it. For instance, your grandmother is sick, and you urgently need to drop everything and visit her. These are all emergencies that you can't put on your schedule. Sometimes, they take a really long time. But to achieve proper time management, you have to deal with those.

Q2 is for important work with unclear or distant deadlines. So you put things off until later. And then later, you do it again. That’s when problems begin, whether it’s your university homework, house cleaning, or freelance project. Work that should essentially take up the bulk of your schedule turns into work that never gets done because of procrastination.

Then goes Q3, which is about not-so-important but urgent tasks. It may be responding to your friends’ emails or washing dishes before your wife returns home. Sometimes, when answering a friend, we spend three hours discussing the latest rumors. Unfinished business has become a new kind of procrastination that distracts us from our work.

And the last one is Q4. It embraces senseless stuff like scrolling through websites. Everyone may have thought at least once they'd read the latest news before sitting down to work. But at the end, we catch ourselves taking the "What kind of pizza are you?" quiz.

So what to do with all this? Divide all your activities into these quadrants. Now, allocate the time you will spend on each. Realize that your top priority is Q2. This is the work that we often don't do until the very end, even though we should. Q1 and Q3 are your second priority, and Q4 is the last. The second quadrant should get the most time, followed by the first and third. Minimize the time spent on Q4.