Sadly I am a 100% procrastinator!
If I am given a week to finish a task, chances are I would be spending the first 5 days doing absolutely nothing about it, but the last 2 days (sometimes even worse – the last 2 hours) rushing like a mad man. Even when the deadline is really close, I would still battle with myself when is the “ideal” time to start: maybe after a bit of tv; maybe after dinner, or maybe after I have a hot shower. After I pull it off, I remind myself how painful it is and swear I would not go thru the same thing again. Yet it just happens every single time.
There is an old say in Chinese - “the most difficult thing is to start”. I totally blame it, coz it gives me perfect excuse not to start “pre-maturely” when I dont feel I am ready.
Also recently I discover that I am getting smarter in knowing what the real deadline is to other people. Usually I will exercise all appropriate strategies to ask for different kinds of extensions. Every time it is a learning experience about the level of tolerance from others which would further strengthens my ability to procrastinate. Honestly even I feel sick about all these, at the same time they bring me some joy when I finish whatever in an extreme short period of time under a lot of pressure. I really dont understand why I behave like this, and apparently cannot help to change it no matter how much I want to.
So I look it up in Wikipedia and see what exactly causes procrastination:
It is the avoidance of an action or task to a later time, which may result in stress, a sense of guilt, the loss of productivity etc. Even it maybe normal for individuals to procrastinate to some degree, in some cases it maybe a sign of an underlying psychological or physiological disorder.
What??
Even I am not sure if there is anything wrong with my prefrontal cortex (which supposingly the area of the brain responsible for executive brain functions such as planning, impulse control, attention etc), I surely dont have the issues of anxiety, low sense of self-worth or a self-defeating mentality. Also I dont think I am depressed, nor having attention deficit disorder (as I can really concentrate when I read or when I play tv games).
Then I move on to the section talking about perfectionism. What a relief! Yes I am a perfectionist and therefore I procrastinate – it is a very comfortable explanation that I can live with. While I am excited to know there is better reason than laziness regarding my behaviour, it goes on to talk about academic procrastination. Perfect, is not just me but also my job and the environment I am working with. I feel so positive and energetic about procrastination. Maybe that is just going to be part of my life.
If I cannot stop procrastination, is there anyway I can benefit from it?
I am very glad to find this article and it talks about structured procrastination. It is no surprise that the author is also an academic, and he justifies procrastination as long as we do not lose productivity from it. Basically we need to maintain a list of tasks that we need to do ordered by their importance. Because we procrastinate, we will try to avoid doing the most important thing in the list by doing something else. The trick is as long as that “something else” is also a task that we need to do, we do not lose any productivity overall. It is a system that we need to fool ourselves (which for a procrastinator we are good at that by nature) what is most important and control what we do when we are procrastinating. My gut feeling tells me that this perhaps is the reason why people have so much time to write blogs or participate in open source software development even they have a full time job. Assuming they have done their job right, then they become super productive in other activities because they procrastinate skillfully and put their energy in the right place.
Combining with a personal productivity guide from here, I would start to write a list of things that I want to do (i.e. to-do list) the next day at every night. Then as expected the most important item usually would be done last, but I would still feel happy and productive as long as I finish everything I list for a particular day. Then I also keep a watch list with stuff that I have to do some time later (e.g. revising all the lecture slides or learn 3D features in WPF). Whenever I need to procrastinate from the to-do list, I would keep myself busy working on the items in the watch list. Hopefully then I will start to gain productivity from my procrastination!
What about time to relax and do absolutely nothing? Well I think I still need that kind of “quality” time, but with this plan I provide myself with some other options (i.e. the watch list) when I need to procrastinate. I am not saying everytime I would pick up some meaningful stuff to do and become a super useful human being, but at least I know I can be positive about procrastination when it hits me.
