Procrastination
When someone says, “You are your own worst enemy”, they probably don’t mean you’re actively working against yourself. That might be the case if you decide to go zip-riding over a canyon when it’s your first time, but usually the expression means you procrastinate a lot.
Ah, procrastination, AKA laziness. One of the best words in the English language, but I bet it took the British a long time to come up with. Everyone has it time to time; even if you’re the most motivated, hardworking person, sometimes you just want to kick back and say “Punt it”. I know it’s one of my defining traits; do you know how long I waited before choosing a topic for this article.
So here’s the question: why do we procrastinate? Although I’m not going to bother providing a citation, a TIME magazine (call-out to anyone who reads TIME) published last year studied why people put things off, from projects to your daily 8 hours of sleep (Hah!) to talking with people you don’t like (hmm…). Apparently there are two big things in psychology that surfaced around 2013 which explain the “I’ll do it later” thinking.
The first is the “What the hell” effect. This is exactly as it sounds, and most people can relate to the feeling of wanting to kick back and leave the rest of the work for the next day, next hour, next millennium, whatever. The magazine article gave an example from mathematical thinking, such as running to lose 400 calories and then eating 500 calories in bites of Big Mac afterwards. (No, not bytes you techies). But you can extend this to any case in which you decide to stop taking life seriously, which is either very hard or too easy for most people.
The second thing is the ‘today guy, tomorrow guy’ psychology. As the article said, imagine you had a job interview the next day and it’s early evening. Your friends are holding a party at their place. Will you go and risk losing the sleep you need tomorrow, or stay in and miss out? If you said yes to Option #1, you probably rationalized your future self’s performance as someone else’s, essentially separating your responsibilities. Today guy (or girl) just wants to have fun, and tomorrow guy can pick up the slack just nicely. If you think like this, it’s easy to see why things get delayed.
Procrastination has only one benefit, as far as I see. As it happens, some types of people work best under pressure, or when they only have one shot at something. A former friend of mine once told me that he does his best work first and everything else is crap in comparison. We were talking about art, which neither of us were very good at (I’m still not), but the readers understand. When he, or people like him, start early on work or do multiple copies, the quality goes down most of the time. People like this tend to second-guess themselves in the time-span between finishing and the due-date; people call this overthinking, or being too AP.
The sad part is: there is no antidote. Procrastination isn’t necessarily a new phenomenon; it’s probably been around for all of human history, just less frequent because late penalties sometimes included death in the past. But people aren’t perfect, and so we have to accept procrastination is here to stay. And that’s okay, k?…Kay.
Photo credit: theruss.net