Last Friday, June 4, 2021, the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical, and Astronomical Services Administration or most commonly known as PAGASA officially declared the start of the rainy season. This was expected to last from June until November.
Due to the colder breeze every morning it’s getting harder and harder to get out of bed each morning. It feels like I’m constantly being pulled by my bed. Most teenagers would refer to this as “bed weather”, a spin off with the term “bad weather”. Rains are mostly associated with bad weather because most people can't freely go out but for most teenagers, we like this weather as this gives us an opportunity to stay in bed all day, hence the term “bed weather”.
As much as I want to stay in bed, get a hot chocolate, watch a film and cuddle with Octy, I can’t because I have a job and a deadline to meet.
This makes me think about how sometimes I procrastinate, but who doesn’t?
Procrastination
-the act of delaying or putting off tasks until the last minute, or past their deadline
An interesting point that is being questioned recently is how procrastination relates to laziness or the lack of self-control or motivation. Most adults would think that teenagers procrastinate because of only one reason, because they’re lazy but psychologists are actually raising a counter argument for this.
They think that most of the time people procrastinate because of perfection and fear. They want to do something perfectly the first time they do it and with the fear of that, most people can’t start anything.
We can’t really blame ourselves for this, we live in a digital age where everything seems perfect. That awesome artwork that your friend posted? She had tons of drafts and failed art before that. That instagram perfect photo somebody posted? She must've taken 100 pictures for that 1 post. This list can go on but hopefully, you get the point.
The only way to beat procrastination is not through hard work, better time management or pushing yourself more, it is accepting the fact that we are not perfect, especially if we did something the first time and to
Start by doing things badly.
If you expect yourself to do things badly at the first try, you are relieving yourself of the unnecessary pressure of being perfect. This can lead to a more enjoyable and exciting experience rather than something you dread not doing.
This is why we say that procrastination is essentially irrational. It doesn’t make sense to do something you know is going to have negative consequences.
-Dr. Fuschia Sirois, professor of psychology at the University of Sheffield
Procrastination is often linked to a negative emotion of a task. Let’s say you’re procrastinating at work, which I’m currently doing, this is because I feel like I’m not accomplishing anything and I’m scared to make mistakes.
Recently, I got on-boarded to take on a UK client and join a UK audit team, which is a huge opportunity but the adjustment from their culture, systems and processes are a bit hard. I feel like they expect something from me and this leads to procrastinating my work.
But if I set myself that all things will have a learning curve and I am still just adjusting. If I tell myself that it’s okay if I do things badly the first time, things might have been different.
In one of my recent article, I talked about how I’m losing focus lately but I think it’s also link with my procrastination which further links to the expectations that I set for myself.
I am just here to remind everyone, most especially myself, that it’s okay to do things badly the first time.
See you around!
Lead image: Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash
Perhaps we can look at this from another perspective: when undertaking something new, perfection is not the goal, but accomplishing a task as best as we can is what we must strive for. Once we have learned how things are done, we can go on to step two, which is doing it better. We often pressure ourselves to do new things perfectly the first time out, forgetting there is always a learning curve in everything.