Rebuilding Rob

One thing I would like to change about myself is my penchant for procrastinating.

Under Pressure

For years, I thought that I just “put stuff off until the last minute” because I didn’t want to do it. In the last few years, I’ve come to realize that I don’t work well unless I’m working under some kind of pressure – self-inflicted or otherwise.

As crazy it that sounds, working under pressure I realized that working under pressure forces me to focus exclusively on whatever I need to get done. It’s as if I put my berating else aside and say “okay, THIS takes priority”. Some of the best papers I ever wrote in college happened the night before, during an all-nighter or the day they were due. In a way, I think this was how i chose to justify my procrastinating ways.

There are two problems with procrastinating, or working under this self-induced pressure, if you will. First, with approach you sometimes end up waiting too long to get started. I’ve done this before and the result was substandard work. The other problem – albeit more rare – is that once in a while, catastrophe strikes and causes something so out of the blue, something so uncontrollable that you’re screwed. One time in college after pulling an all-night essay jam, the motherboard on computer died shortly before class. This was way before Google docs or “the cloud”. My document was gone. I didn’t even have a partial print out of it. I had to re0start from scratch. My professor was kind enough to give a an extension of a few hours; but to this day, all I remember was that the first version of the paper was much better of the two.

A trait of anxiety

I’m not sure how much I’ve talked about this here, but I struggle with anxiety. I’ve met with counselors from time to time but have been taking anxiety meds for several years. Recently, I stumbled some social media posted debunking the notion that procrastinating is a sign of laziness. Like so many things pertaining to human psychology, it goes FAR deeper than that. The internet is filled with articles like this one, aptly titled The Link Between Procrastination and Anxiety

The self-fulfilling prophecy

One idea this article doesn’t discuss – though I have seen brought up elsewhere – is the idea that procrastinating gives the perpetrator a sense of control in that it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: “I told you this task was too hard. I just ran out of time,” or “I was finally working on it when x,y and z” happened. It’s a weird from of empowerment for the procrastination; even though it’s a result of self-sabotage. They tool control of the situation and it worked out exactly as the thought it would

If there’s a proverbial silver lining to the dark cloud that is my knack for procrastinating, it’s the fact that there are some big tasks that I actually will start on right away; plugging away at it bit-by-bit and finishing with time to spare. Maybe that’s a sign that some tasks make me less anxious than others…

What is one thing that you would change about yourself? I’d love to hear your thoughts…

Thanks for stopping by Rebuilding Rob. All of your views, likes and follows are greatly appreciated! Be sure to follow me on social media as well! Check out my most recent posts below…

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The article “I’ll title this later” first appeared on Rebuilding Rob