FIGHTING PROCRASTINATION

So today, lets talk about the main issue that plagues the life of any individual who actually does want to go places in his life but can’t, because of this one fatal disease. Procrastination.

The following is an account on how I procrastinate.

I’ve always found that the evenings is the perfect time, when all the euphoria and happiness that you felt during the day while you were conveniently postponing something you absolutely had to do, for something you really didn’t need to do, just dissipates.

During the dark hours between 6 and 8 p.m, you begin to realise that it might just be too late to achieve anything that day and you think about where all the time went. If some of you get extremely distraught during these hours like I do, you’ll begin to calculate the amount of hours in a day, in a week, and in a year you waste doing absolutely nothing to get where you want to be.

The next phase is intense guilt and depression and you begin to realise, being the great procrastinator that you are, your life might just be an endless vortex of doom where dreams go to die.

It is with these morbid thoughts that you crawl your way to that space on the internet where all of you procrastinating souls usually end up. Pinterest. ( No, not Facebook. Jeez!)

You type ‘procrastination quotes’ in the hope that you’ll find something that will fire you up enough to put an end to this disease. Instead, you find quotes like- ” Ask yourself if what you are doing today is getting you closer to where you want to be tomorrow”. So, you pause for a minute and your eyes search your room for anything that you did today that will get you closer to passing the math test tomorrow. Instead, your eyes settle on the video games lying by your bed and the pile of Calvin and Hobbes comics that you’ve read countless times before, yet you decided to choose this specific day to read it again. For the 57th time. Or you read a quote like- ‘Yesterday, you said tomorrow’ and you realise that Pinterest is the only one who really knows you.

Now, being the great procrastinator that you are, if there’s anything that you’re good at, it’s lying to yourself. However, the evidence in your room, that proves that you did absolutely nothing useful, is overwhelming. So, you decide to give up on life, slam your laptop shut and lie down on your bed, pretending to be a vegetable for the next half hour.

Then you listen to kelly Clarkson’s ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ and you decide you’re going to fight this disease. You’re not going to take this lying down. You’re going to fight. You’re going to win. You’re going to be the next president. You’re going to be rich enough to buy your school and fire all the teachers who pointed out your procrastination issues to you. All you have to do, is the pass the test tomorrow. This is a new beginning to your life of greatness and power. You are in complete control of your life. You can make it.

You open your textbook with renewed vigour and a smile on your face. The smile, which gradually vanishes when you don’t get a single question right and it dawns upon you that you know nothing. You glance at the clock. It’s twelve.

Now, this phase, ladies and gentlemen, is called escapism. The rational mind would stay up all night and study because it knows that flunking the test tomorrow, for the fourth time, might just lead to getting you kicked out of the house. But really, how often do we listen to our mind? So, lets close our textbooks, set the alarm for 3:00, 3:15, 3:17, 3:22, and 4:00, assuring ourselves that we’ll get all the right answers when our mind is ‘fresh’ in the morning.

Of course, we end up waking at 9:00 and consequently flunking the test. Again. But hey, at least, you got nine hours of sleep right?

We promise ourselves, this is the last time we are ever going to wait till the last minute to do anything again. Ignoring the marketing test we have tomorrow, which can wait, because right now, Calvin just said something extremely funny.