WP1: If procrastination isn’t about laziness, then what is it about?
“Etymologically, “procrastination” is derived from the Latin verb procrastinare — to put off until tomorrow.”
My story — how it all began:
As someone who has been putting things off until the very last minute, I find the Latin definition of ‘until tomorrow’ a severe understatement. While I certainly am not proud of making such a claim, something about procrastination feels so good that I keep falling back to the same vicious cycle.
The very first signs of my severe procrastination surfaced around the same time that USC adopted remote learning in reaction to COVID-19. Prior to this switch, I had certainly pushed things off before but not nearly to the extent I found myself in after taking up ITP-115 (introduction to Python) in my fall 20 semester. Having no prior interactions with computer programming, I was excited to explore the languages of 0s and 1s. The initial two weeks of the class went by smoothly — printing ‘hello worlds’ and drawing shapes with semicolons was fun-filled. By the third week, however, I started to find it hard to complete the homework assignments. As much as I understood everything in the lecture, at least I thought so, I would get stuck on a single sentence for hours at a time, head-scratching to come up with a code that gets by. The first zero I got on the first major project crushed me; all the time and effort I have spent in exchange for such invalidation. As time quickly went on, I found myself progressively more confused after every lecture, to a point where I do not even comprehend what the question is demanding of me(the worst kind of struggle). It is around this time that I began avoiding the lecture recordings and discussions altogether. Below is my thinking process during the time:
- I spend an hour and a half to watch the recording and take notes
- I go ahead and download the three weekly assignments, and proceed to have no idea how to complete any of them
- I go on Google, Chegg, Codecademy to seek an easy way out for an answer and of course, I get nothing
- Since everything is remote, I have hardly any access to classmates, TAs, or my professor so this doesn’t work either
- Spend the whole day being anxious and eager for an answer, ends up with hardly any progress
- I could have spent today playing basketball or games and the results would have probably been about the same
- Conclusion: Why do I even try???
After a series of internal debacles, I believe I have reached a point where I’ve given up on not only ITP-115 but my semester as a whole. My dislike for online lectures continues to grow and I don’t even bother to attempt the assignments except for midterms and finals. In retrospect, I remember experiencing momentary fear whenever I open Blackboard and a surge of low self-esteem when I click in to check my grades. The bittersweet feeling continued to flow through me until a final relief upon the delivery of my report card.
Till today, I look at this report card and Blackboard with the same attitude I had a year ago: of minor disgust and major reluctance; this energy has carried itself into my academic life and become extremely hindering. Some examples of my shifted mentality can be seen in direct avoidance of assignments and asking for repeated extensions even when I had more than ample time to complete things. In simpler words, I adopted the habit of voluntary delaying.
In order to find out why I was consciously putting everything off to the very last minute, I turned towards YouTube.
Tim Urban’s amazing TedTalk, in a nutshell:
When we take a look at the anatomy of the procrastinator’s brain, we will find something other than our rationale — the instant gratification monkey. For simplicity’s sake, we will refer to the monkey as Marcel. Now, if Mr. Rational understands how to properly control the monkey, he or she would simply find themselves with a cute companion; in reality, however, most of us are not equipped with the proper training to handle Marcel. While we are trying to get work done, Marcel will come in and tell us to take a Buzzfeed quiz on what type of Pizza we’d be, go on Amazon to try to find a perfect, useless mug, and eventually end up on a Youtube spiral. By the time you finally decide to kick Marcel out of the steering wheel, it has become too late to complete anything at all before our next commitment (absolutely hate when this happens). The truth is, our instant-gratification monkey should never take charge; in terms of Marcel’s thinking: as long as I have food when I’m hungry, go to bed when I am tired, and do nothing difficult at all, I am a successful monkey. This constant internal battle between the conscious mind and Marcel results in our rationale being weakened.
Therefore, as time goes on, Mr. Rational finds himself in the passenger seat more often, heading towards a place referred to by Tim Urban as the infamous ‘Dark Playground’. Here is what my personal interaction within the park looks like.
This is a place where every procrastinator knows by heart. Time after time I found myself indulging in shameful pleasure that I wasn’t supposed to enjoy. Upon learning about my own behavior, I realized that the dopamine hit I get by postponing an assignment isn’t real happiness; deep down my rationale knows that I have unfinished tasks waiting to be completed. A dark playground is a place filled with guilt, shame, and a whole lot of anxiety. I’ve constantly found myself being in a position where I can neither play nor work because of how much guilt I am in.
Procrastination, explained by science:
From an outsider’s perspective, it might seem as if I am simply slacking off and being lazy; interesting enough, this is the exact opposite of what’s going on. In my head, during periods of serious procrastination, is a strenuous game of tug of war between my instant gratification monkey and the conscious yet passive Mr. Rational. The result? A weird compromise between the two that can only be classified as ‘fake productivity’.
Real productivity = investing your time
Fake productivity = killing time
Before I decide to take a crack at this final portion of the paper, I’ve spent half an hour reading, 20 minutes folding my laundry and 10 minutes of meditation to gain focus; I even set the AC to the perfect temperature so that I can formulate the perfect environment to start working. I am now realizing that everything I just did has absolutely nothing to do with my WP1 and everything to do with my mood. In order to avoid writing something that triggers a negative response in me, my brain takes over by doing everything it can do to distract myself in that specific moment hoping that it can turn me away from the task at hand.
“We really weren’t designed to, evolutionarily speaking, think ahead into the further future because we needed to focus on providing for ourselves in the here and now” — Dr. Hal Hershfield, professor of marketing at the U.C.L.A. Anderson School of Management.
Dr. Hershfield’s research is the perfect representation of my mental state: I want to provide inner comfort through means of performing equally mentally intensive tasks that appear more pleasant. This explains why I choose reading and meditation over netflix or gaming; deep down I still would like to stay ‘productive’. Foolish enough, I perceive my “future self” more like a complete stranger than part of myself. In other words, I do not care about the future consequences as long as I get a temporary mental relief. When I procrastinate, I genuinely believe that the task I am putting off — and the accompanying negative feelings that await us on the other side — is somebody else’s problem.
To make things worse, science shows that we’re “even less able to make thoughtful, future-oriented decisions in the midst of stress.” (the New York Times). Our amygdala works as the “threat doctor”, detecting things that will be harmful to our self-esteem or general well-being. Even if we intellectually realize the futility in postponing a task, leaving us less time to complete and more stress in the future, our brains are wired to prioritize threat removal in the present; today, researchers clinically refer to this as the “amygdala hijack.”
Final Thoughts:
To be completely honest, I don’t feel good about submitting this paper half a week after it was due; ironic enough, procrastination got me here, and I spent most of my time researching the topic instead of dealing with it. However, I now understand that procrastination is only the surface phenomenon, with a psychological aversion vicious cycle as the root problem. Marcel the instant gratification monkey is not to be blamed for taking over, my brain is. Voluntarily, I invited him to chauffeur me to the dark playground, with no regard for upcoming guilt and anxieties.
Thus, procrastination is not merely about laziness, but rather a matter of:
- Fake productivity as a obstacle
- Evolutionary response for our brain to eliminate immediate stress
- Leaving tasks behind for “some else”: our future self
Yet, I now learned that it is only the present self who can get the job done, not the future self. I will now carry forward with this knowledge and tackle the root problem, one layer at a time…
Works Cited:
Glei, Jocelyn. “Forget About Fake News, the Real Problem Is ‘Fake Productivity’ •.” Jocelyn K. Glei, 23 June 2017
Ho, Leon. “Why Do I Procrastinate? 5 Root Causes And How to Tackle Them.” Lifehack, LifeHacks, 2 Mar. 2021
Lieberman, Charlotte. “Why You Procrastinate (It Has Nothing to Do With Self-Control).” The New York Times, New York Times, 27 Mar. 2019
Roomer, Jari. “The 4 Real Reasons Why You Procrastinate (No, It’s Not Laziness).” Medium, 18 Feb. 2019