Procrastination
You need to do something uncomfortable, so you funnel your attention into a more pleasant task and then you feel happy temporarily. It has happened to you? This is called procrastination and, for many of us, it's a frequent problem. But, firstt of all, what does procrastination mean? Procrastination /proʊˌkræs.tɪˈneɪ.ʃən/ The action of delaying or postponing something. Procrastination is something we do to avoid uncomfortable things. Even though procrastinating makes us feel happy temporarily, it has negative long term effects. You see, looking for instant gratification it's not the best decision all the time. Whenever we think about a uncomfortable activity, the pain center of the brain lights up. Some activities seem to be harmful and painful, but surprisingly, it's only the anticipation that looks painful. Tim Urban humorously explains it in his TedTalk by saying that we have a rational decision-maker and a instant gratification monkey in our mind. Our rational decisition maker helps us to see a big picture, to have long term plans, and to visualize the future. The instant gratification monkey, instead, wanna do easy and fun activities. Whenever we're procrastinating, our instant gratification monkey takes the wheel and we enter to the "dark playground," in which we do a happy activity ignoring the boring (and sometimes important) ones. This has a cost, however, it causes you stress, anxiety, and so on. But we have a savior called the Panic Monster, which wakes up when a deadline is near or when a scary consequence will happen. This Panic Monster terrifies the monkey and finally the rational decision maker takes the control of your mind. This reminds me the Parkinson's Law, which states "works spands so as to fill the time available for its completion." This means that if we give ourselfs two hours to complete an activity, we'll use the full hours. The same happens if we gives ourselves ten minutes: we'll use the complete ten minutes to complete the activity. Here we can find the first key to defeat procrastination: limit your time by setting deadlines so that your Panic Monster is involved. Procrastination is like a habit and, in order to stop it, we need to anylze it. As you may know, a habit has three fundamental parts: cue, response and reward. Some authors like James Clear includes 'craving', meanwhile, Barbara Oakley mentions the 'belief' as a part of a habit. I've already mentioned that we procrastinate uncomfortable activities and do the pleasant ones, but what if those uncomfortable activities were pleasant? That's another key to beat procrastination: make uncomfortable activities funnier and easy to do. In order to do that, divide your goal into easy-to-complete micro goals and ask yourself, "how can I make this activity more pleasant?". This can help you to diminish procrastination but if your space is sourrounded by distractions, it will become even harder. So, make a list of your distractions, whether it's notifications, social media, noise, and so on. Then, ask yourself, "how can I get rid of distractions?". For example, turn off notifications, use headphones and listen to your favorite music and charge your digital device in the kitchen and not in the bedroom. Summary - Set deadlines - Identify what prompts you to procrastinate - Find ways to make uncofortable activities more pleasant - Get rid of distractions
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