25 December 2015:
Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему.
I went out with T yesterday. A phone call ensued along the way and I truly got to appreciate the beauty of this phrase by Tolstoy. Or, as Cherry said to Ponyboy in The Outsiders, ‘Things are rough all over.’Recently has been a rather lousy period for me, with multiple internal and external factors adding to it all. (Almost like a history essay’s introduction but it’s real life.) And I realised that most of these factors actually stemmed from procrastination.
(Which, again, really feels like a history essay in which the author traces factors back to a central cause. But I digress.) So off I went to Google about procrastination and ended up reading three articles on Wait But Why.
I must admit that I am a serial procrastinator and it is, in fact, extremely debilitating. However, just like Tim Urban, the author of above-mentioned articles, says it: procrastination isn’t something you can just ‘avoid’ or stop.
I dare not say procrastination is on the same level of mental illness, but it is extremely similar in the sense that chronic procrastination ties in with many other ills like addiction and whatnot.
What Urban did in his articles, very helpfully, was to breakdown why we procrastinate, and how to solve that problem. He makes use of fancy terms like Rational Decision-Maker, Instant Gratification Monkey and Panic Monster to properly explain just that.
I have, in the past, searched for articles on procrastination but I must say that this is by far the most helpful one I’ve encountered. Currently I’m on leave from full-time National Service, and it is in fact the best time to effect change.
(Using the word ‘effect’ here brings back JC memories of how me and J would step-intellectual by debating its usage, whilst our real-intellectual history teacher uses it without fancy.)
For those who do not suffer from procrastination, it is probably very hard to understand what it actually feels like, but a snippet of it would be: you may be decent in your pursuits, but deep down you know extremely well that you are only at 50% of your fullest potential and procrastination is stopping you.
TTFN.
This post was written after I chanced upon two beautifully-written blogs by two guys who are about the same age as me, musing about life and more.