Why Procrastination is Actually Good For You...

hey 42 here Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his first symphony at the age of 8 at the age of 8 most children are busy contemplating what dirt tastes like but Mozart was a genius in the truest sense of the word but he was also a chronic procrastinator in october 1787 Mozart's newest and highly anticipated two-part opera was due to premiere at prague national theater but the night before the premiere Mozart went out drinking with his friends he told his friends that he had not yet written a single musical note of his latest opera it was true the Opera didn't even exist yet because Mozart had put it off until literally the night before yet that night over just three hours mozart finally put quill to paper and scribbled down the entire musical notation for his brand-new opera whilst his wife kept him awake by reading folk tales to him such as Cinderella during the performance the next day the ink was still wet on the musical notation and the orchestra had not even rehearsed once yet all went smoothly and Mozart's opera called Don Giovanni was very well received by the entire audience so with it my advice to you is to avoid starting that humongous and very essential project until the night before No obviously that is terrible advice because I'm willing to bet that you're not quite the genius that Mozart was Martin Luther King also wrote his I have a dream speech at the very last minute it is also widely rumoured that Abraham Lincoln quickly scribbled out his famous Gettysburg Address in just a few minutes during the train journey to Gettysburg but again don't fool yourself into thinking that you could do the exact same thing with your university thesis the slow claws of procrastination will eventually sink into was all the bigger the task ahead of us the more likely we are to instead tune into MTV to find out what some morally and socially challenged teenager is doing for their sickly sweet 16th because at the end of the day we can always do it tomorrow and inevitably we will tell ourselves the exact same lie the following day procrastination is so prevalent amongst us all other Germans have even written a short poem about it Morgan Morgan or Nita zackin al awwalin Lita tomorrow tomorrow not today all the lazy people say procrastination is even entered medical literature some people actually plan to procrastinate telling themselves that they don't want to and actually won't start a project until just before the deadline the logic is that when one is under a supreme amount of stress they are more likely to put a greater amount of effort into the task the medical world has named this student syndrome and no that's not another one of my crappy jokes it really has got that name procrastination is always seen as a bad thing an ugly quality in a person that should be eradicated but what if we look at it from a different perspective some psychologists believe that procrastination can be a good thing and a powerful tool and we should all be utilizing I bet you're thinking wow I should be actively doing absolutely nothing more often do tell me more Internet man well sort of it's only in very recent times that procrastination has been viewed by society as a negative quality in a person for most of history it has been quite steep opposite the ancient Greeks and Romans had great respect for the art of procrastination after all rome wasn't built in a day they spent the first thousand years figuring out the most sociable way to take a crap the Romans in Greeks believed strongly in the power of doing Bouguereau for many hours at a time instead of putting up that shelf that has been sitting there for a month or writing their memoirs they would quite happily choose to sit around in their togas all day counting reduces snakes for they believed that it was only when we do absolute nothing that up greatest ideas and epiphanies can manifest in our minds high-ranking ancient Greeks and Romans would go as far as only doing something when and if they absolutely had to they had the most severe student syndrome it is often forced that professional tennis players are at the very top of their game because they are so fast but in actuality the complete opposite is true the very best tennis players are the very best because they are the slowest of all players they procrastinate more than other players let me explain when a tennis ball is served in your direction you have less than 500 milliseconds to gauge its velocity and trajectory position yourself correctly and ensure you deliver the perfect stroke to return it in the optimum way an amateur player will try to play as fast as possible they will hastily rush to wherever the ball is heading they will swing in a general direction whatever feels right in just a split second whereas a professional will spend every one of those 500 milliseconds setting up the perfect return play their stroke has been perfected to such a level that they are able to feel more vital milliseconds to think about how the ball was served and the current position and gait of their opponent nothing is rushed their response has been perfectly measured in a slow calm fashion and thus their return play will be infinitely better than that of any amateur sometimes by slowing down you can achieve greatness for some people procrastinating is the only way that they can actually get anything done at all and can in some situations produce higher quality and greater quantities of work let's say you have a deadline looming such as finishing your final college assignment and you should have started about three months ago but to the last it's the night before you're supposed to hand it in tomorrow yes you've written the ground sum of two words title here in this extreme situation which by the way studies have shown us an astonishing 95 percent of students actually do on a regular basis something supernatural happens in your brain panic starts to set in as it suddenly dawns on you that if you don't write 10,000 words tonight you'll walk away from two years of study without a qualification at all and so a flood of adrenaline is released at your brain more precisely your body releases a huge amount of epinephrine epinephrine is like cocaine on cocaine studies have proved that when taking stimulant drugs such as cocaine and to a lesser extent caffeine your productivity skyrockets you are able to achieve many times the quantity of work in any given time period and your ability to soak up and learn new information is also greatly enhanced but epinephrine or adrenaline is a far more powerful drug than even cocaine under its influence you can achieve things that you never thought possible such as writing at ten thousand word essay in one evening many people myself included rely on this adrenaline release we experience when we are under severe pressure and facing a fast approaching deadline to complete huge amounts of work that we would otherwise never even begin so procrastination can sometimes with an asterisk be a useful tool but what causes it why do you sit up it ii am googling your dog's name instead of working there's a secret about procrastination that not many people know procrastination it's not caused by laziness or a lack of motivation when you decide to watch a video review of a toaster that you don't or will never own instead of working it's not because you are inherently lazy your peers in truth research has shown that most people procrastinate because they are stressed think about the last time you procrastinated did you have a huge dark cloud of stress hanging over you and maybe you had a deadline fast approaching and you hadn't even started the work maybe you had to do your finances and you know that just by looking at the poor state of your finances it was going to cause you some significant stress so what did you do instead you did something completely different you play video games you ate you watched useless videos like this one you procrastinated but what you were actually doing is relieving the stress surrounding that task that you are supposed to be doing psychologists believe that procrastination is no different than smoking a cigarette or drinking alcohol it's just a mechanism to relieve the stresses in your life the problem with this mechanism is that in a cruel and ironic way it steals the precious time that you so vitally need to solve the problem that is causing you distress in the first place but crust a nation may be useful from time to time getting that adrenaline flowing at the very last moment so you can achieve superhuman levels of productivity but chronic procrastination can really affect the path that your life will take you see there are two kinds of tasks in your life the deadline tasks and self-imposed tasks deadline tasks are when others have set a strict deadline whether it be your boss or an educational institute you may procrastinate instead of finishing such a task for many many weeks but when it comes to the final hours most people will use that kick of adrenaline and overwhelming panic to finish all the work and do a fairly okay job of it in the end but things are completely different when you set yourself a task say you have a great idea for a business that you'd like to start on but the time and effort required to get it up and running is monumental so most likely you'll just never do it you procrastinate at you say you'll join the gym and finally get into peak physical shape but of course you never do why because you have no deadline to do these things nobody's going to reprimand you or punish you if you don't start up that business within the next six months or attends the gym everyday life will just go on as it always has and you will forever tell yourself that you will start working on it next week this is called chronic procrastination and it's not a good thing because you could potentially be denying yourself a life-changing opportunity that hampster bathing suit company won't start itself you know many of us suffer from chronic procrastination it's hardwired into our biology we are programmed to avoid dangerous and potentially risky situations anything that strays out of the normal urban flow of our everyday lives such as starting a new business or taking up a new hobby could potentially be risky that risk may come in the form of financial social or even health so our biology is pre-programmed to just avoid that risk by never acting upon it by procrastinating indefinitely but what if I told you that there are some really simple cheats you can use to say goodbye to chronic procrastination forever and start actually achieving things for once the world's best psychologists have been working on ways we can easily overcome procrastination for years and these are the secret techniques that they have come up with and without trying to sound too much like an infomercial here they have been clinically proven to work I've tried to myself and they really do but first it sponsor time and what better way to kick your procrastination habit and put your mind to something great than by joining Skillshare Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes in design business technology and so much more a premium membership gives you truly unlimited access to high-quality classes on most no topics so you can improve your skills and on lock new opportunities maybe you can finally start that business you've been dreaming of all these years orb learn a skill that you never thought you'll be able to such as cooking or programming if like me you've always been interested in entrepreneurship and starting your dream business you should 100% check out the skill share course entrepreneurship hustle from business plan to real-world success it's an essential introduction to creating a strong brand that people will remember and talk about it's a must-watch skill share is also more affordable than most learning platforms an annual subscription is less than ten dollars a month that's just a couple of coffees and since skill share have kindly sponsored this video the first 500 people to use the promo link in the description will get their first two months completely free so for goodness sake stop procrastinating click on the link and start learning something amazing today so what are these techniques you can use to finally start the work that you really should have started about two weeks ago the first technique is to simply break down that huge task into tiny really specific tasks and then set a time limit to each of these micro tasks your first micro tasks can be write a list of micro tasks whatever you do just don't procrastinate on that otherwise you'll enter some weird paradox and go into another dimension or something even though this technique doesn't actually reduce your overall workload psychologically it feels so much more achievable and in every single way easier to accomplish a series of very small tasks than one huge task it's similar to when I want to eat a very large pizza just take it one slice at a time every time you finish one of these micro tasks your brain will release a shot of dopamine and you'll feel accomplished thus maintaining your morale and vastly increasing the likelihood that you'll move on to the next task instead of giving up altogether this next trick sounds blatantly stupid but it's ridiculously powerful simply start the war just force yourself to begin but here's the trick tell yourself you're only going to work for five minutes and then you can continue whatever useless procrastination you were in the middle of five minutes ago just five minutes that's all in every study where this technique was attempted with test participants almost every person voluntarily continued working well past five minutes and many simply continued working on the task for several hours even though they had told themselves that five minutes was all they had to do psychologically once you begin working on a task even if it's really difficult and natural urge to want to keep at it kicks in and it actually becomes harder to stop than to carry on 99% of the difficulty of overcoming procrastination is actually starting the work hence the old blank page writer's block dilemma but because the hardest part is making a start you may have to force yourself to do so in Homer's Odyssey it tells of a fable involving the Greek King Ulysses Ulysses and his crew were aboard a ship whilst passing an island full of sirens you know those many islands full of naked devil women that you see absolutely everywhere the sirens were singing out in angelic voices and calling out Ulysses to join them on their sexy rocky outcrop Ulysses knew that he could not resist the temptation of the sirens so he ordered his crew to forcibly tie him to a mast on the ship and block his ears until the seductive sirens were long outta sight so what's the lesson here when you are faced with a huge amount of work and the blank page or just an island full of naked women you must be really forceful with yourself and just make a damp start thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video and you want to support the channel to make sure I can continue to make them in the future then consider clicking the join button below to become a part of the private 42 community here on YouTube where you'll get early access to all my new videos and show private vlogs by myself I'd also like to thank Skillshare once again for sponsoring this video don't forget to use the promo link below before it's too late to join Skillshare today because trust me you won't regret it

Channel: Thoughty2

Views: 790,552

Keywords: procrastination, time, work, effort, lazy

Id: i4LrPobIcxI

Length: 17min 49sec (1069 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 05 2018