It seems that procrastination is really a world wide phenomenon. I’m pretty sure a good part of any country’s population “suffers” from it. I’m trying to rationalize that weird human behaviour and I’m having a really hard time doing so. Where in the evolution of our specie was procrasting an advantage? How did it end up being such a strong tendency for so many?
I can kind of understand why we tend to do it; avoiding painful or difficult tasks, being overwhelmed by the amount of work to do and being scared to take the first step, wanting to relax now… But that surely didn’t help us catch more mammoths.
Which leads me to wonder if our society of instant gratification made the problem worst. I guess we kind of loss that threat that we’ll starve during winter if we don’t stock enough food during autumn. It seems that pretty much whatever people do, there is a way for them to get bailed out.
Consequences would usually be one thing that gets us going… but few things really bring consequences that are truly worth not forgetting about. After a student gets detention a couple of times, he just doesn’t seem to be more motivated to do his homework the next time; “well, I prefer relaxing now… worst thing that could happen is I get another detention. I survived two already. No big deal.” And he goes back to playing video games…
So some people try to give themselves punishments or rewards in order to motivate themselves. Even if it is a pretty low level motivational tool (punishments and rewards), it works very well on kids and, it seems, on many adults too. The tricky thing is that to follow through with a “self punishment”, you need to be very disciplined… or masochist (how different these two things are from each other is open to discussion).
Ok… Discipline! Parents (some of them at least) try to teach their kids discipline, teachers try to teach their students discipline and most adults are trying to kick themselves in the butt to be more disciplined. It’s not easy. But it seems that good discipline is the key to achieving great things (or maybe obsessive-compulsive disorder is…). Being disciplined is being able to listen to the good little voice inside of you that reminds you about the consequences and being able to ignore the other voice that tells you to slack off and have fun now. No wonder why it’s so difficult to have a good discipline. I think there are two things that can help us be a bit more disciplined: our education and being intrinsically motivated.
How do we become intrinsically motivated? By caring, first; Which is not a given for most teenager thinking about school. Secondly, by having a passion for something. I think passion is one of the strongest weapon against procrastination, but we rarely have a passion for everything important that we should be doing. And finally, by keeping the (good or bad) consequences in mind and being really concerned about them (so we kind of go back in a loop there).
I really wish there was a secret recipe to beat procrastination. When our students would be immune to Tony Robbins, we know there is no easy solutions. In the end, I guess the best we can do is the same as for everything else: find a decent balance between all the extremes. In this case, between working too hard and mental health. It does seem that culturally, Japan has a tendency for the first one (which opens another huge discussion…), but teenagers are teenagers and some seem to be very fond of their mental health.
That being said, I do have some of the most motivated students I ever had right now… I think I’ll go ask them some tips…
____
Hello, my name is JD and I’m a procrastinator.
Will you join my support group?
Some humor from professional procrastinators: Grad Students!
No comments:
Post a Comment