Duniatera.com - In college, I was a government major, and I had to write a lot of papers. For my 90-page senior thesis, I planned things out so that I would start off light, and then bump it up in the middle months, and then kick it up into high gear at the end.
After the first few months, I couldn't quite do stuff, and then the middle months went by, and I didn't really write words. Then, with three days until the deadline, I wrote 90 pages over 72 hours, pulling not one but two all-nighters.
A couple of years ago, I decided to write a blog post about procrastination. I found out that the brains of procrastinators are actually different than the brains of other people, and I wanted to explain why.
The Rational Decision-Maker will make the rational decision to do something productive, but the Instant Gratification Monkey doesn't like that plan, so he takes the wheel and says, "Let's read the entire Wikipedia page of the Nancy Kerrigan/ Tonya Harding scandal, then go over to the fridge, then go on a YouTube spiral."
The Monkey wants to keep humans well-fed and well-slept, but the Rational Decision-Maker wants to take the big picture into account and do whatever makes sense to be doing right now.
When it makes sense to be doing something easy and fun, the procrastinator tends to spend a lot of time in the Orange Zone, which is entirely out of the Makes Sense circle.
Procrastinators know the Dark Playground, where leisure activities happen at times when leisure activities are not supposed to be happening. The Panic Monster is their guardian angel, who wakes up whenever a deadline gets too close.
The Rational Decision-Maker and the Monkey discussed the future of India before doing a TED Talk. The Monkey suggested that they zoom in to the bottom of India and scroll up for two and a half hours to get a better feel for India.
The people of TED decided to release the speakers, and I opened up the website and saw my face staring right back at me. The Panic Monster started losing his mind, and the Rational Decision-Maker took over, and I started working on the talk.
When I wrote about procrastination on the blog a couple of years ago, thousands of emails came in from all different kinds of people from all over the world, saying the same thing: "I have this problem too". The contrast between the light tone of the post and the heavy tone of these emails struck me.
In situations where there is no deadline, the Panic Monster doesn't show up, so the effects of procrastination extend outward forever, and can be the source of a huge amount of long-term unhappiness, and regrets.
I read these emails and I had an epiphany: I don't think non-procrastinators exist. Some of you may have a healthy relationship with deadlines, but the Monkey's sneakiest trick is when the deadlines aren't there.
I want to show you a Life Calendar, and I think we should all take a long, hard look at it. We need to stay aware of the Instant Gratification Monkey.