Procrastination
It’s always been a problem for me, especially with school projects. In fact, the farther away projects were, the more appealing they seemed. I would view them as a personal interest and have fun doing it while feeling all the dopamines of being productive. However, as deadlines drew closer, they seemed less of exploration and enquiry, but instead a chore I had to complete in time or else.
So yeah. Procrastination. For me, there are two modes of procrastination. The typical type where I do other things to occupy my mind and keep the impending doom out of sight (like I am now), and there’s the type where I enter this superposition of being relaxed but also panicking yet not being able to find the motivation. The second one is what really gets me and is definitely the more stress-inducing one.
My school is in China, so we’ve been doing the whole online learning thing for quite a bit now. And through the 7 weeks, I’ve had my ups and downs. I’ve had days where I’ve cleared everything like 4 days in advance, and other days of me staying up till 2 or 3 to finish that piece of work due last Tuesday or something. Yeah, pretty sure we can all agree that online learning is definitely inferior to its face-to-face counterpart as of the technology and training available now, but the whole quarantine thing has also taught me a thing or two.
Throughout the days, I’d often forget to unwind. Well, properly unwind. I’d always manage to convince myself that I can multitask, so my work was sluggish, slow, and often turned in at the last minute. But as the weeks passed on, I found that taking breaks would often help me focus better. It could be going around the house, it could be neatening up my room, or even just a few strums of my guitar currently leaning against the wall. It provided a sense of satisfaction that online learning doesn’t really pack, not even with Microsoft Teams’ turn-in animations. I’d feel remotivated to jump back into taking notes or ploughing through that analysis question.
And this would help me in general too. I found myself being slightly more organised, starting with self-set calendar events reminding me of classes, to making lists of tasks for the day (well maybe that ain’t a lot). My guitar also kinda did improve, as I was leaving it untouched before the quarantine. Currently in an extremely sparsely populated area, I’ve also started to take jogs around the house, so there's that. Our pace through the learning curriculum may have been slowed, but I’ve managed to re-pick up a few hobbies and try a few new ones.
The takeaway of the day? There are two types of procrastination: not doing anything, and being somewhat productive while procrastinating. The latter sounds like a load of crap, but I suppose I’ll take it over the alternative.
First thing I wrote other than the hello tumblr post. May sound overly verbose, but that’s the name of the game blog.