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deadlines | 2018-01-10

permafrown

17 Aug 2024 — 3 min read

The esteemed Tim Urban, over at Wait but Why?, is a self-proclaimed procrastinator. He even did a TED Talk on the subject.

I understand his predicament. That may be why my man, Dan, has started to refer to this as ‘trivia nonesday’.

Before I get into my main point here, I think it will be helpful to sum up the Wait but Why wisdom on the topic.

If you want to dig fully into Urban’s posts/musings on it, find the links at the bottom.

WBW says that everyone’s brain contains a ‘Rational Decision Maker’ who looks holistically at life and plans accordingly, making decisions based on goals and experience.

The RDM is what separates us from the animals — that capacity to plan and understand things over a long period of time.

The RDM is why Canadian farmers work so bloody hard in the warmer parts of the year because they know that:

While the good people of New Zealand tend to view their daily work with much less immediacy:

A procrastinator’s brain contains another denizen of ill repute, however.

The real troublemaker is the “Instant Gratification Monkey”.

Whenever the RDM decides it’s time to get down to business, the IGM steps in the way and draws all focus to the average flight velocity of a laden swallow… cuz that’s super-important!

WBW refers to this place of distraction as the ‘Dark Playground’, in which there is fun but it is all tainted with guilt, sadness, and dread… super-bleak and accurate.

While the monkey runs through the Dark Playground, the RDM sits back and cries, and the thing that was supposed to happen doesn’t happen.
(you may be doing this right now…)

So, the procrastinator’s mind is caught in this little descending spiral of “let’s get this done” followed quickly by “NOPE! let’s do this instead!!”

But there is a third member of the procrastinator’s brain-team who is capable of breaking this hideous cycle — the PANIC MONSTER!!

The panic monster is the only thing that scares the monkey and it comes in when all hope is nearly lost and everything must happen now!

See these three working together below:

WBW_ref — #threefriendspanickingtogether

It’s a system and it works… not a good system that works well.

WBW wraps up his initial salvo more or less at this point by noting three things:

This sucks
This is not the best a procrastinator can do
The panic monster only assists with critical things, not other good things

In a follow-up post, WBW presents a model for making this crap system work.

It involves Planning & Doing and realizing that ‘accomplishment’ and ‘success’ are the hind-sight, distance views of the boring, menial task-by-task process of actually doing something.

It also involves making your way through the ‘Dark Forest’ of initially starting a task and sticking with it, as shown here: