Procrastination is not habit, it’s habituation
This is my first post in medium since I registered one year ago. I write this because I’m triggered by my friend’s post at my Facebook news feed. He wrote some tutorial about Data Science, and another one wrote about Deep Learning. But that’s not only my reason. Another reason is I must learn to write English in correct grammar (so please correct my grammar if I’m write some mistake) and I must push myself to do it. (And if you are still asking another “why” question, then this post doesn’t answer all of your “kepo” behavior).
Preamble
The Doraemon’s opening song translation in Bahasa Indonesia said that “Aku ingin begini, aku ingin begitu. Ingin ini, ingin itu, banyak sekali. (I wanna be like this, I wanna be like that. Wanna this, wanna that, so much thing that I want).” Yeah you know, sometimes beginner always hopes to see the result as fast as they starts learning.
Doing something in a rush will not make you get result faster, but you’ll end up multitasking which not effective at all, because your brain is not a computer. You may want to learn many things at once in short time, but believe me, you can’t.
You must focus to do something at one time. Don’t try to learn X while you are still focus at Y. But, will it murder your creativity and curiosity? Yeah, maybe.
Focus is not about forgetting
Focus doesn’t mean you forget the other things. It mean you must allocate time to fully focus into it. For example, when you want to study about matrix multiplication in mathematics, you must focus about how to multiply it. In the same time, you don’t need to think about how to running your hello world program in Java, because it’s not correlated. But, once you want to learn about coding in Java, you should switch your focus for a while about your problem in math.
It’s not easy, right? Yap, I agree. Even I still hard to follow this advice. So, what can we do? I think this behavior is related to how you manage your plan. A bad plan will return a bad result. Then, the second question which is the biggest problem of all human is: how are we fight to procrastination?
Procrastination is not habit, it’s habituation
I made this subtitle because I think all people don’t want to procrastinate their to-dos. But, since they are lazy or <put all thousand reason here>, they think that they will do it in the near future. Then when future comes, they just do a little bit part of hundred task’s steps. To make it worse, they said that “at least I have done that and made progress,” without looking back at their plan and re-check whether they called “progress” is far enough to be called “progress” or not. Later, it can be called as “justification”.
How you can say it’s a “progress” if you are just done with counting one lamb, where you have to count 1000 lambs on the field?
This recursive “justification” leads into some biased view, accusing that “procrastination is bad habit”. I say BIG NO for it. Procrastination isn’t habit, it’s habituation. So, instead of saying that “procrastination is bad habit” you must say that “procrastination is bad habituation”. Why? Because, source of procrastination is your justification that leads to habituation, then, even worse, you said it is a “habit”. Hey, you made it. So, please admit that it’s your made and fault.
Procrastination isn’t habit, it’s habituation.
How we fight procrastination?
I don’t know the exact answer for this question. Even I, still trying to fight it. But, recently I read BBC’s article which mentioned some tips to fight it. In brief, it said that we must control our negative thought over our task. It means, you must avoid some judgement about our task, i.e: “Ouch, I think this task will make me bored.” or “It’s better to stroll around the city park to get good mood before doing this task (then you never touch your task again after coming home with reason that you are tired).”
Then, as I said before, you must plan your task. Push yourself to do it. Say to yourself, like “if I’m doing it right I will get … <insert some achievement that you will get>”. Try harder to push yourself to do it. Then, this good habituation will become habit. And, yap, you can say good habituation results to “habit”. To be clear, for example: when you can be morning person already because of the result of your workout, you can say “Wake up early in the morning is my habit.”
But, again, don’t try to call the result of bad habituation as “habit”. Just don’t!
Changes log:
2017–01–08
* Thanks to Farah for correcting my grammar.
