Procrastination: I will write the title later

I am what a person would call as a master procrastinator. Procrastination is the act of delaying action or a task. I remember as a kid being told that tomorrow will never come, as usual, I did not comprehend the actual meaning of that statement. But a few years along the line as I tried to cram in the last chapter of History while simultaneously looking at Geography definitions, I painfully understood it. Procrastination would usually start with the person postponing with the tasks for a minimal amount of time, then that person would find another completely irrelevant task to perform and it goes on until they are in an endless loop of doing completely haphazard and self-destructing things.

For example, for my tenth-grade board exams, while my very responsible and rational friends were done with half of the portions, I took my electrical piano apart to get a better feel of the music when I played it later. I went down through multiple spirals on Youtube that would start with me watching a Stephen Hawking lecture and somehow ended with me watching a thirty one-minute video on how Faber Castell makes their pencils. It was a complete and utter waste of my time.

So the question is why. Why go through all of this when the outcome is clearly not an agreeable one? Well, there are various reasons. Firstly, perfectionism, perfectionism is a refusal to accept anything that is less than perfect. This causes a sort of fear of what if that person fails to meet that standard of complete perfection. This would leave the person anxious, hopeless, and impatient. So this person would wait for a while until this feeling would go away and hopefully get a fresh start. But what is the timeline for a while? Is it an hour? Or forever?

Secondly, it’s clearly an impulse action. It is purely whimsical. Think of the human brain as a boat driven by a sailor and with the sailor is a monkey. This was the idea proposed by Tim Urban who has the podcast “Wait but Why”. The sailor represents the responsible and rational person within ourselves. The monkey represents the primal and vagaries of our behavior. As long as the sailor is at the wheel the journey will be as smooth as ever. But the thing about the monkey is that it is very stealthy. It might tell the sailor that before they start their math homework they should finish color coding all of their stationery and from that, it will lead them into watching TV and onto the next thing until the day would have been over and they would not have started anything. This is called a dark playground. This is, unfortunately, the most dangerous form of procrastination. This mostly occurs when people are bored with the monotonous nature of the task and this the driving cause of procrastination for almost half of the chronic procrastinators.

Last but not least, it is delay discounting or in other words, focusing on short term happiness over the long term ones. Our human nature is to find the happiness that is not tiring and harmful to our spontaneous nature, simply to push that aside is almost torturing to hear. Even watching an entire video on how the Falklands were created would seem like a much better idea than studying or doing the said task.

So how does one fix this? Normally along with the presence of the monkey and the sailor, there is a panic monster that comes out during the time that is closest to the deadline. The Panic Monster is the only thing that the Moneky will adhere to, but when the panic monster comes along the entire system is in unequivocal chaos, but somehow the task is completed. This is the classic strategy of a procrastinator.

Retreating back to the question, what if there are no deadlines? What if the panic monster doesn’t have a reason to show himself? Procrastination is not experienced by only students, it’s experienced by people from different walks of life. Age, occupation, or any factor of self-control that the person understands they have does not preclude them from procrastinating. Unfortunately, there isn’t a one size fit all solution for procrastination, but there are several steps to follow that could guarantee a new and a better way of accomplishing tasks.

These steps involve effective planning. Now there is a difference between effective planning and planning, planning is a procrastinator’s sixth sense, albeit it wouldn’t seem like it. Effective planning prioritizes important tasks over others, it also makes the process of doing the tasks much more digestible. The person should learn that whatever they do is their choice, that fact should be internalized. Or it can involve creating a faux deadline for yourselves. It is very paramount that the person should aim for slow and steady improvements. Remember, Rome was not built in a day but it was burnt in one.

The truth is, as mentioned above, the way to overcome this phenomenon depends on that person and their own preferences. All we can do is to know that we can start now, well maybe not now but tomorrow.

Acknowledgments: Tim Urban's Website: Wait but why. https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/how-to-beat-procrastination.html.