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A Letter to Myself: Procrastination

Dear procrastinator, 

You need to seriously start working. When I address you as a procrastinator, I feel embarrassed. You teach students in your time management seminar how to minimize procrastination. You mention Duhigg's Power of Habit and Cal Newport's advice... but you don't seem to apply them to your life all the time. The ironic thing is that you end up procrastinating yourself. How can you be contradicting yourself? Maybe I am too harsh on myself and I am aware, but I can't let this go on. 

If your mind still wants to delay the task, consider this hypothetical situation that could turn into reality. You are told by your teacher you have a test, homework, or project. The teacher tells you a month or weeks before the deadline so you can start right away. The problem is that you don't want to do the task. You say to yourself, "It is so hard. I don't like studying. I find studying so boring." Then, you have the other voice in your head that fights this. In the end, however, the procrastinator mind wins. The mind tells you to do some important but not urgent task so you feel productive, but you really aren't. 

It becomes so bad that you don't start working until a day or two before the deadline. You cram a semester's worth of information into a night of studying. You wake up at 5 AM to hastily write a report. When you finish, you feel guilty. If you are taking a difficult test, an air of self-loathing surrounds you. Half of the time you aren't even sure if you got the answer right. Worse, you forget some of the things you crammed. You know it is wrong to procrastinate, but you keep doing it over and over again. You know it is wrong to cram, but you don't listen. 

I hate scaring you, but you don't want to end up explaining to your parents that the reason you didn't do well in a class was because of that one test/essay/lab/project you bombed. If your parents want to ask even more about that particular disaster, you mumble the words, "because I procrastinated." Not only does this makes you feel sad, but it makes your parents disappointed. The fact that you procrastinated means that you could have prevented the situation from going haywire. You had the potential and capabilities, but you ended up not using them. 

Now that I have presented you with this hypothetical situation, are you going to do it again? Let's be honest. You already did this before on various classes that I will not elaborate. You don't want history to repeat because that shows you failed to learn from your mistakes. I mean, procrastination cannot be eliminated from our lives. It is a psychological tendency that all humans have. Even though this sounds like more of a private diary entry,  I think this should be published on the blog. The benefit of putting this on the blog is that you can refer to this article whenever you feel like procrastinating. If this blog can't even stop your brain, I might have to end up recording this letter by audio. 

Now, I will stop writing. Get back to work. 

Vivian 




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