Procrastination – Who’s the Captain of your Ship?

Have you ever found yourself avoiding something that you knew was obligatory? Or when you realize it is obligation time, you all of a sudden become the most creative and most active person, doing everything else BUT writing your B.A paper, for example? Well, I can bet that there is not a single one of us who has not experienced the intricate nature of procrastination at least once.

A while ago, I ran into the enthralling and eye-opening Ted talk of Tim Urban, which I could re-watch over and over and I would still find his explanations amusing and so on the spot. In it, he explains how the brain of a procrastinator usually offers residence not only to the rational decision-maker (which leads us towards the right choices at certain times), but also to the instant gratification monkey which takes over every time our better half decides to actually get something done. Sounds familiar already? Well, there’s more to that. Urban then continues into explaining that every time we face a deadline for a paper, for instance, the moment it approaches, the panic monster emerges in our minds, chasing away the monkey into its lair and letting us actually get the job done.

By now you are probably recalling a variety of situations where you have finished your task in the very last moment – a school project, studying for an exam, submitting a paper and so on. It has happened to you and that’s normal. However, what about all those things that you have postponed but there has been no deadline for you to meet, such as: going out with a friend you haven’t seen in a long time, going to the doctors for a check-up, or getting started on a project that will get you closer to achieving your goal? It is this kind of situations that Tim Urban emphasizes as the most critical ones. The ones when the panic monster has no reason to appear for as there is no sudden burst of anxiety about an unfinished task to force it out of its corner. And if there is no panic monster, guess who will be in control of our decision making?

It is then - when we are procrastinating on the things that we set as our goals, that we are most likely to fail. It is not because we aren’t smart or qualified enough for what we want to do, but because we haven’t fully tried, as there is a part of us (the one that prefers the easy way out or that is scared of failure) which questions our decision to do the rational thing and instead would have us do anything else but. Moreover, since it is our own goal, there is no one else to push us into accomplishing it other than ourselves. Unfortunately, sometimes that is quite hard, especially when our fear of lack of success triggers the monkey within our brains to go wild. Anyway, once we fully comprehend that the fact something doesn’t work out from the first, second, or even the tenth attempt doesn’t mean we need to give up on it, we will be able to prevent the monkey from being in control in crucial situations. So if there is no deadline on achieving our goals, then we should set one for ourselves. Find the approach to motivate yourself in a way that will make you eager to try again if it doesn’t work out from the start. But do start. Don’t just say you’ll do it later and expect it to naturally happen that way as we all know how well plans turn out most of the time.

The way I see it, the monkey lives within every one of us and certainly, there is a significant number of times when it takes over the wheel (if I start telling my stories of it, I could write a whole novel). Once we acknowledge it, though, it is up to us to put it under control. We are the ones that could have it tame (not entirely, of course). We could even develop reasons and situations to force the panic monster to come out and chase it away. And just like with any other flaw of our character, the faster we face our drawbacks and the obstacles they could create, the faster we could anticipate how to use them to our advantage.

Let’s face it. Procrastinating could bring some quite enjoyable situations about. Although it’s perfectly alright to relish the entertainment cruise the monkey could grant us, we have to make certain it won’t stay in the way of fulfilling our dreams. And this is where the tricky part would begin for real.

P.S: You could find the link to Tim Urban’s Ted talk below. If you want to sneak a peak behind the complexity of a procrastinator's mind and understand it better, then I strongly urge you to invest the next 15 minutes into watching it.

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