The Confessions of an Anti-procrastinator

 Have you ditched your homework or assignment or an important project just to fall down the Youtube rabbit hole? Have you opened the first chapter of your textbook to the topic you have a test on tomorrow but you ended up watching this Netflix series till 2 am in the morning? Ended up finishing the task at the very last minute, but you wish you could have had "more time" to have done it better? Then look no further, here comes the anti-procrastination guide from someone who has a nervous breakdown over the thought of procrastinating.

From school days to my Uni days I have been terrible at procrastinating. People say that it was a remarkable talent but I always found it a bad habit because I was borderline obsessed about the task that my mind would not rest till I completed it. This has continued on till my PhD days where I continue to squeeze in as much work I can do in 8 hours, sometimes overworking myself. There have been moments when as an undergrad I had gone over my class notes gazillions of times just waiting impatiently for the professor to send in the assignment or the extra slides that were shown in class which we were told not to copy because they would be shared over moodle later? But I used to take them down anyway because I was too impatient for them to be uploaded onto moodle? This all came to me from my in-built anxiety over the fact that  if I was asked to do something at the right end I would end up having a mental breakdown and my throat would close up even at the thought of it. But this left me with the option of not being a very spontaneous person and bad at improvisation. If I am not prepared with something then my brain would not register it in the last few milliseconds. I was terrible at it but in my undergrad days I became a little better because sometimes notes or old question papers got shared the night before the exam and I had to learn roll with the punches. 

However I would be a liar if I said that I was a complete anti-procrastinator.

To say it in the simplest of terms, I choose the things I want to anti-procrastinate. And these things are mostly subject matters where I feel that I would disappoint myself. This mostly has always been with respect to academia and my research (something which I enjoy doing) and also administrative paperwork (something I hate). Things which I would want to be as close to perfection as possible. I might get so engrossed in doing these things that I might end up procrastinating on cooking food or cleaning the house or doing my laundry. However here the procrastination comes mainly from either priorotisation of these other tasks that I am obsessed with or sometimes just pure laziness. The latter case being when I would just end up lying in my bed, having a nap, or watching Youtube or Netflix and forget about my domestic chores. I remember I was in the darkest of times towards the end of 2019, when I could not keep up with all my work, which I had the anxiety of not being able to finish and the constant fear of my life just rushing past me and me just being left behind somewhere. 

And isn't it scary to be left behind? To be abandoned. Solitude is my heaven, but abandonment is scary. 

I believe I like to be a spectator looking at the world from the outside, but I am equally terrified of the idea of not having a world at all to look at. And I feel that is what drives me as an anti-procrastinator, the fear of being left behind as even the procrastinators catch up with the rest of the world at the last femtosecond by the sheer ability to work through all the adrenaline pumping through them and me just standing around with shaky hands and being a nervous wreck. 

So I would tell everyone procrastinating out there that I admire you all for your incredible talent of being the spontaneous Homo sapiens that you are and the ability to move with the sign of the times and improvise. As for me, I will try to dial my obsessive anti-procrastination down a notch and try to hone the evolutionary skill that has been handed down to the 21st century man to act in the spur of the moment. Because I believe that although the earliest Homo habilis had every tool ready for every situation they also had to use their skills of flight or fight when they came face to face with a lion (assuming that the some ancestor of the lion existed back those millions of years ago) like we do when we today have to sit for an exam which we haven't studied at all for the entire semester?