Procrastinators and Daily Highlights
So Yes! I am a procrastinator. Yes, like all the procrastinators I always make time-tables, that never got followed, and plans, that never executed. So what’s the difference between a procrastinator’s mind and a non-procrastinators mind. According to Tim Urban(a blogger), both have a Rational Decision-Maker but, all the procrastinators have a sidekick in their brain, and that is “Instant Gratification Monkey”. So the Rational Decision-Maker will make the rational decision to do something productive, and make some plans for that, but the monkey doesn’t like that plan and says, actually let’s hop on to the Youtube or Instagram or go over to the fridge, to see if there’s anything new in there since 10 minutes ago. That’s how a procrastinator keeps himself/herself busy the whole day/week.
The Instant Gratification Monkey only cares about two things: easy and fun. And to the monkey, humans are just like another species. You have to keep well-slept, well-fed and propagating into the next generation, which in tribal times might have worked OK. But if you haven’t noticed, now we’re not in tribal times. We’re in an advanced civilization. we’ve all got an endless list of stuff that we could be doing. The more we get done, the more we have to do. That’s where the book “Make Time” by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky comes handy. Jake and Jhon, both used to work at Google, they spent their careers designing products like Gmail and YouTube.
“Make Time” is a sort of productivity book, and talks about how we can focus on the things that matter most to us. And on top of that, the book talks about one important question, why life is so busy? So there are two main things that contribute to this “Busy Bandwagon” and “Infinity Pools”.
How did you spend your time last week? When you think back does your week seem like a blur, like a dream you can barely remember? And you can barely remember anything. If so it’s probably because you spent the entire week on the Busy Bandwagon. It is a cultural belief that if you’re not busy, then you’re doing something wrong. We treat being busy as a badge of honour. Then there are Infinity Pools. Infinity Pools are the apps and services, websites, whatever, anything in our life that has sort of an infinite supply of content that is always refreshing. The authors refer to Infinity pools as the “Distraction Kryptonite”, just as kryptonite renders Superman powerless, whatever app it is and whatever service it is, it sort of makes us powerless to resist.
So the busy bandwagon defaults to endless tasks and the infinity pools default to endless distraction. So we got the problem busy bandwagon and infinity pools. But the issue is that we tend to rely on willpower to win over a habit. Because those become habitual actions, and whenever it about habit vs willpower, habits are gonna win.
To prevent the busy bandwagon and infinity pools from turning our daily lives into a blur of meaningless activity we must learn to live more intentionally and to live more intentionally we need to focus on daily highlights. To illustrate the power of daily highlights, try to recall, what you remember about a trip or a conversion, that will be a pic moment of joy, not entire experiences. So if there is no pic moment or highlight in our day, then our day will seem just like every other day in our weeks and months will become a blur. The idea of the daily highlight is that each day we’ll choose a single activity that we’ll prioritize and protect in our calendar.
The highlight can kind of be anything. It can be finishing off a piece of work or, you know, doing a workout or even just going for a walk. It’s not the only thing that we’re gonna be doing, but it’s the thing that we wanna definitely make time for that day. As Jake and John says “focusing on a daily highlight, stops the tug of war between infinity pool distractions and the demands of the busy bandwagon. It reveals a third path being intentional and focused about you spend your time.” The next step is, how do we pick our highlight each day? And it can be whatever you want, but John and Jake say that if you’re struggling to pick a daily highlight, you can think of it in one of three ways, urgency, satisfaction, and joy.
So, set a highlight you can ask these three questions to yourself; “what’s the most pressing thing I need to do today?” or “At the end of the day what would give me the most satisfaction?” or “when I reflect on my day what experience will give me the most joy?”. And you can say is, writing these articles are my weekly highlights.
(Irony: The designers of team Youtube are writing a book about, “How to get out of the recommendation loop”.)
