Defeating Procrastination for University Students
What is one task you could complete to make tomorrow an effective day?
It is by asking this question repeatedly every single day that we can finally get an answer to our daily struggle to carefully manage our time.
The Urge to Procrastinate
It has become a common figure in our ever distracted modern world. Procrastination can take many forms, but before we get to that…
Disappointment Panda
In his bestsellers which I highly recommend for everyone reading my blog since it gives a basic philosophy of life, author Mark Manson invents a creature called “Disappointment Panda”. Now he argues that this creature could be the one that nobody wants but everybody needs. He would be like the grease stain on an otherwise clear glass window. He would break our day by uttering phrases that nobody likes hearing but we all need to pay attention to. He would be the cure for our constant pleasure driven, consumption controlled life.
Oh its the doorbell! Disappointment Panda just arrived. “Life is essentially just a series of problems, Deep” he says. I ask him to elaborate. “I see you just bought a new car. Now that takes care of the embarassment you felt owning a beater, but it leaves you with high maintainence fees, a high interest loan to pay and financial stress in your family”. And with that, he puts his hat back on his head and goes trotting off into the sunset, never to be seen again, leaving me wondering where he came from in the first place.
How does this have anything to do with procrastination?
Ever had that feeling where you wait for the motivation to come from elsewhere to get started on a task? Yesterday was one such day for me. I did everything except what I planned to get done! The morning was spent reading stories online and the afternoon and evening was spent catching up with friends and family. I needed disappointment panda to let me know what needed doing. I needed him to remind me that uni was going to open soon. But he was nowhere to be found.
Here’s a link to Mark’s blog for you to browse at your leisure! I recommend starting with his post on procrastination.
Be our own disappointment panda
Prerequisites:
- Bamboo
- Loads of space
- An endangered species costume
Jokes aside, its cruicial to cut the daily junk food diet of consumerism that attacks us. This is important for focus on what’s important, rather than what is urgent, because it’s these that generally get us distracted from what we actually care about. Have you ever:
- Impulse bought items you didn't actually need from e-commerce sites?
- Compulsively checked your phone when you should be working, studying or working out?
There are definitely actions within your reach which you can take. You most likely already know the steps you need to take to cure your bad habit. Then why don’t we all do it?
The Myth of Motivation
Its another wednesday afternoon. You’ve just come home from work and its 6pm in the evening. You look at your todo list and there in big bold letters it says “Start a video for a new Youtube channel.” Sound familiar?
I’m going to tell you how to defeat this lack of motivation today. Here’s a story to illustrate my point:
Not long ago, there was an aspiring author who, much like me, was interested in writing his own book. He set his vision and had the credentials he needed but could never get started on the right foot. He wrote paragraphs but they just didn’t look perfect. He could never seem to get it right unitil…
“Two crappy pages per day”
That was the advice that allowed Tim Ferris to publish multiple bestsellers, including “The Four Hour Work Week.”
The reason why we think a lack of motivation occurs is because we normally do not get started until we get inspired and motivated to do so. However, motivation actually works like so:
Many of us (including me) often make the mistake of starting at the inspiration. Instead, action is the element that is always within reach and when that is your only measure of success then, well, even failure pushes us forward.
