Defeating Procrastination
Ah, procrastination. The beast that gobbles up your time with or without your awareness. The elusive creature that was borne out of the interplay between our consciousness and unconsciousness. The disease that has plagued students and non-students alike. This will be you guide to tame this beast.
When Marley the ghost laments, "I wear the chains I forged in life". He's referring to the chains of habits that were too light to be felt until they became too strong to be broken. Procrastination is one of those chains of habits.
Let's take a look at why we procrastinate. This is important because just like in medicine, your doctor needs to find the cause of ailment to know which medicines to prescribe. From an evolutionary point of view, our distant ancestors lived in an environment that would put our definition of "living on the edge" to shame. Survival was hard and gruesome back then. We needed to avoid becoming dinner to some ridiculously overpowered animals. Food was hard to accrue so conserving as much energy as possible was necessary. If something did not have an apparent contribution to our survival then we didn't care too much about it because why would we waste our precious energy? Fast forward to a few thousand years, modern humans still have retained very much of the evolutionary traits from our distant ancestors. We are inclined to only do things that will help us with our survival or dopamine inductive activities. Dopamine is one of the chemicals that are responsible for the happiness feeling. When you have sex, you release dopamine. You're eating? Dopamine is being released. The brain is hardwired to seek out behaviours that release dopamine. Every time you accomplish something meaningful you get a dopamine hit.
The problem is that studying has no direct impact on our survival. You won't die just because you flunked school. You will still survive even if you don't work. Thanks Centrelink. So now we need to appeal to the dopamine reward system to motivate us to study. The easy part is that most of us already believe that studying is probably a worthwhile activity to spend your time on, because a higher ATAR gives you a wider range of university courses to choose from so you will have higher chances of getting what you want in life. Then why do we still procrastinate even though we believe this? There are two reasons:
- We think we have too much time
- We do not understand the power of our daily actions
Time Management
Let's talk about the first reason. Parkinson's Law states that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. For example, if you allocate one whole day to finish off a set of maths questions, you will probably take that whole day or even more to complete that task. However, if you allocate only half a day to finish those same set of questions then you will probably get them done in half a day or a whole day. So the basic idea is to set an artificial yet realistic time limit for every task you want to accomplish and write it down, because if you don't then you will use the maixmum amount of time available. Whilst this artificial time limit system is easy to implement, being able to follow it is a different story. The key is to construct a simple and powerful timetabling system that doesn't require too much maintenance and make it a habit to keep using it.
The timetabling system I used in the HSC that worked particularly well required a day to page diary and an exercise book. In the diary, each day I would list out everything I needed to do, homework, assignments, chores etc. For each task, I would break down what needs to be done into manageable chunks. I give you Mark Twain: " The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one." Here is an example of what a page of the diary would look like.
Then I would get out my exercise book, write down today's date, pick out a few tasks from the diary and write them down on the top right of my exercise book and start allocating time for each of these tasks (usually in 25 minutes intervals). This is what a typical page of my exercise book would look like. Whenever a new task came up(eg. homework) I would write it down in my diary so I don't forget about it, and at the end of each day I would cross out all the completed tasks in the diary for that day's page. The next morning, I would refer to my diary entry for the previous day and recopy all the uncompleted and unfinished work into the new day's page leaving out the ones that I had already crossed out. This way you are always re-exposed to the work that needs to be done so you don't forget to do anything. Rinse and repeat. The most important part is to keep using this system. The more you use it, the more effective it becomes.
The real power of our actions
Now let's move onto the second reason on why we procrastinate. If we compare a high achiever with an average student, what would we see? One aspect that would stand out is that the high-achieving student consistently works hard, whereas the average does do some work, but not in a disciplined fashion. Whatever you do now can be categorised as:
- Simple productive actions that work towards your marks
- Simple error in judgements that do not contribute to marks
Consistently doing the first thing will eventually get you the marks you want. Consistently doing the second thing will lead to failure and mediocrity. The successful student understands this principle whether consciously or unconsciously. They know that what they do everyday matters. Most people think that what they do in one day does not make a difference in the long run, some procrastination here and there is no big deal, they can always make up for it in the future. But the reality is that it does matter. Whilst your everyday actions seem insignificant because you don't see any immediate results, but what you don't see is that they compound over time and they make all the difference. The modern society is marred by the misconception of time, we expect to see the results in the blink of an eye, when in fact it is only natural for any kind of process to take the course of their due time. Rome wasn't built in one day and Uluru didn't form overnight.
You have to view any actions with the eyes of time you have to make your choices based on what you know, not what you see, because the rewards aren't immediate. Ask yourself, "if I consistently do this, where would I be a year from now on?". The difference between success, average and failure is a fine line. Success is when you consistently perform actions that make a positive contribution. Failure is when you make it a habit to favour actions that are unproductive. Average is a mix of both. You start off with $0 and whenever you do something, you make a deposit or withdrawal from your account. A productive action is a deposit, and a non-productive action is a withdrawal. Everyday you make a number of deposits and withdrawals. If you consistently make withdrawals your balance becomes negative. You want that shiny, new and luxurious car? Sorry you don't have enough cash and the centrelink money isn't enough to cut it either. On the flip side, if you keep depositing, you will eventually have enough to get what you want.
Adopting this mindset won't be dramatic at first, there is no radical new thing you will be doing. It's just as easy to adopt this mindset and just as easy not to. This is why most people are unproductive, because they choose the latter. When you see a person with good marks, most people think that it was an overnight success. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was the consistent action of doing the productive thing every day that lead them to this achievement. So start making choices with the end in mind. The results won't be apparent right now but if you keep pushing at it, you will get there.
What's Next?
Just reading this alone won't magically stop you from procrastinating. You have to take action. ACTION. If you don't do something, you might as well have just wasted the past 10 minutes reading this. As Einstein puts it: "If you do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got." Remind yourself to revisit this post, because humans have an amazingly fragile memory and after a few days you would have forgotten what you have read here.
Check out the guide on organisation: http://community.boredofstudies.org/1178/general-discussion-2017-hsc/358993/guide-being-organised.html
Let me know if you have any questions or any other topics you would like me to write about.
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