Inside the mind of a master procrastinator | Tim Urban
About the Speaker
Tim Urban is a Writer/Illustrator and co-founder at Wait But Why. He writes about life, happiness, procrastination, relationships, history and a lot more.
Summary
Tim Urban starts his talk by firmly establishing himself as a procrastinator. Recounting an episode from college where he had to submit a paper, he says that while people would normally try to spread out their work over the multiple weeks or days that were available before the deadline, he himself took a “procrastinating” approach and undertook the task of finishing the workload in a single day or, in case of his 90-page senior thesis which you are supposed to spend a year on — in 3 days.
Urban then explains how he started writing about procrastination after he felt a need to understand how the minds of procrastinators and non-procrastinators are different and he presents his finding to us in the form of an elaborate picture. Urban explains that the minds of human beings have a wheel that has to be controlled. For controlling this wheel, human beings have a Rational Decision-Maker in their minds. He is responsible for making rational decisions and doing productive things. The minds of the procrastinators, however, also have an Instant Gratification Monkey. And in this case, whenever the Rational Decision-Maker tries to do something productive, the Instant Gratification Monkey comes along and takes the wheel. And being a creature that lives entirely in the present moment with no memory of the past or no knowledge of the future, all he wants is to do things that are easy and fun.
So, while the Instant Gratification Monkey sees us as animals and only thinks it necessary to keep us rested and well-fed, the Rational Decision-Maker gives us the ability to do what other animals cannot — to see the bigger picture, to visualize the future, to make long-term plans and to do what makes sense to be doing right now. While sometimes it makes sense to be having fun — at other times, it doesn’t and that’s when the Monkey and Rational Decision-Maker disagree and we go to the “Dark Playground” doing leisure activities when we are actually supposed to be working.
Urban explains that procrastinators get help getting out of the “Dark Playground” through a guardian angel — the Panic Monster. The Panic Monster is the only thing that the Monkey is afraid of and while it is dormant most of the time, it comes to life whenever a deadline starts approaching — pushing the Instant Gratification Monkey to the back of our minds and letting the Rational Decision-Maker take control.
Urban continues to explain how after writing an article about this, he got lots and lots of emails from people — some very frustrated people and how, only after reading them, he realized that though the procrastinator system worked, it did have its flaws. Urban says that the procrastinator system works well in places where we have deadlines. However, when the deadlines are not there, the panic monster doesn’t show up and the effects of procrastination are not contained like before— they just spill over and at times, even make us feel like a spectator in our own lives.
Urban concludes his talk with a powerful image — a picture containing a box for each week of a 90-year life and we realize when we see it that there are not a lot of boxes in there. Showing us that we only have limited time here in this world, he warns us to stay aware of the Monkey in our brains and encourages us to work on whatever is important to us — whether or not it has deadlines.
My Thoughts
What I love about this talk is how Tim Urban manages to keep it so light-hearted and interesting through the use of simple illustrations and his own real life examples of procrastination and still manages to give out such a powerful message in the form of a single picture in the end.
Urban describes all of us as procrastinators because haven’t we all put off important things when we have had no deadlines for them. However, the important thing to realize here is that although we do not have too many boxes, if we work hard — we also do not have too few.
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