So after going through a lot of topics and websites, I discovered a website named “Wait but why” of Tim Urban. On this website, I read his theory of procrastination. Inside each human’s brain, we all have one Rational decision-maker and this is the one who is in charge of making wise decision that are good for your life. However, along with it is an Instant gratification monkey who only wants to do easy and fun things. So these two often do not get along with each other and the usual case is that the Instant gratification wins. That monkey will drag you from your assignment to all those non-related things that it can think of like in my case, watching a Ted talk or searching for some “interesting topics that I did not have time to read” or maybe washing dishes, immediately! Fortunately enough, we also have a Panic Monster, the only one that can scare the monkey and get us back to work with an unbelievable productivity but the sad truth is that this monster only appears when it knows the deadline is just so near and after that, everything is back to normal. That is the theory of procrastination of Tim Urban, to which I feel so related.

 

Once in a while, I often spend time for self-reflection and oftentimes, I realize that I usually wait till the very near of the deadline to start working on it crazily. As a procrastinator, I “Think” quite a lot. We all know that New Year resolutions of people, I also have them and not only that, I have had many plans and goals during the year: “I will start learning French”, “I will practice reading Chinese characters”, “I will update my blog more often”, “I will get my reading habit back by reading 1 book a month”, “I will wake up early to practice Yoga”, the list goes on. Half of the year went by and those plans were hardly done. These plans have no deadlines like all the assignments at school, it is long-term and it is life’s plan. As these plans have no deadlines, the Panic Monster will not wake up and if your rational decision-maker is not trained to be strong enough to fight back, the Instant gratification will win. The dangerous thing here is that plans that have no deadlines involved are usually those that have major impacts in our lives but we cannot see the result immediately which leads to the continuous delay “Saving it for tomorrow” and that tomorrow will never come. This long-term procrastination oftentimes will be the source of regrets, disappointment and the most important, loosing trust in yourself as you keep continuously breaking promise to yourself.

 

Fortunately, I found one promising solution for a procrastinator like me, it is not something new or a wow factor, I did take it once in a while but I forgot it sometimes. So, with this paper, I whispered to myself “You can do it with baby steps, baby steps”. And yes, simple as it may seem but it works. At first, I wrote the first paragraph when the idea came up then each day I wrote a few lines more till the day I just focused and finished everything at once-when I was writing this sentence. Big dreams or inspirational goals do not have to be done at once; we all can take it with baby steps, slowly but enjoyably and carefully head toward our goals. We may or may not get to the final destination but one thing for sure is that we have no regrets and we learn things on the journey. Life is an on-going journey of learning.

 

At the end of the day, I realize one important thing which motivates me a lot: Our life is not that long as we think it is. By wasting our time, we are wasting our life. As I mentioned above, our life is a chain of our choices and given the only life we have, we should make choices that leave us no regrets. There is one rule of the legendary Coach Wooden that inspires me a lot “Make each day a masterpiece”. We are painting our own life, how will you draw it?