Why Do We Postpone Our Activities to the Last Minute? by Parisa A.
Why Do We Postpone Our Activities to the Last Minute?
written by Parisa A.
Welcome visitors to my post. I am Parisa Ahmadi a second-year master of architecture student. As you know I also work in HOWE as a grad consultant. So most of you might have that architecture student friend who is always making models and busy with a lot of things days and nights, which is true. So being busy as an architecture student and a graduate student I still sometimes find myself doing nothing while I am snowed up to my ears in work. So I decided to write about procrastination for you today.
This Friday I decided to plan the weekend for myself to work, so the plan was not to study for Friday and work Saturday and Sunday full time. So what happened was I found myself lying on my bed staring at the ceiling for a long time doing nothing on Saturday around noon, the day that I was supposed to work so hard. I had this weird feeling in my stomach that something is wrong, a kind of feeling that is related to stress. I knew what is wrong with me but I still did not want to do anything about it. What accidentally happened the same day as I saw an Instagram post from a psychologist about reasons for procrastination. And guess what? I found my reason! Thus I want to share some of the reasons and some of the solutions for postponing things we should do with you graduate students folks.
So based on his post, the solution to procrastination is not in time management, it has something to do with our ability to manage our emotions. He claims that we mostly postpone activities that evoke negative or bothering emotions in us. What does it mean? When we should do an activity that can arouse our stress, pain, fear, ambiguity, or exhaustion, we tend to avoid it until the last moment. The reason behind this is delaying these activities can act as a pain killer that helps us feel better for a short time while its long-term adverse effects are too serious to be ignored.
The first step to dealing with this is to stop blaming yourself and stop perfectionism. The majority of people who postpone their jobs are the ones who are looking for perfection in their job, so what happens is they always are struggling with this strong feeling of judging and criticizing themselves in their mind, thus they postpone their job just to avoid facing this. While the worst part is more you postpone your responsibilities, the stronger and more harmful becomes this feeling.
The second step toward this issue is getting help from others. When you have to work on a project that you assume that this project is vague, useless, or boring putting it aside is the easiest thing to do. While if another person is accompanying you throughout this process who is watching your progress and care about the result, you won't give up on the project easily. This person can be anyone, a friend with that you set up some goals with each other and share your progress, a mentor, or even regarding writing it can be a consultant helping you with your paper.
Reading this Instagram post reminded me of the time I was applying for graduate school. At that time I had too much on my plate, and I remember what helped me was my friend who had the same situation, so we used to send a small to-do list to each other every night about our next day's activities. Then at the end of the day, we would mark what we have done and what is left. So watching each other's progress acted as motivation. So I can say this solution has worked for me and I hope it works for you too as well.
To sum up, I should mention that the issue of procrastination is not just about you. It is something almost everybody with any job needs to deal with it in some part of his life. Learning about it and finding practical personal solutions for this would help us to make progress easier.
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