The confessions of a former procrastinator
I don't procrastinate. I will tell the story of how I changed from being a horrible procrastinator, to an extremely efficient person.
WARNING! Unsuitable reading for underage persons, this advice could seriously spoil your future career.
In my teens, I used to procrastinate whatever I was going to do. I didn't matter whether it was an exam or meeting my friends at a club - I procrastinated well over the last minute also regarding things I wanted to do. I was always late, my friends often had to wait for me for and hour or more. I was late for school every day, even for exams. When I got a flat of my own, I was 18, and then the procrastination extended to simple things such as paying bills, posting important letters (applying for students loans, papers for employment, whatever). I was still late for everything as well. I travelled a lot during this time of my life, and I was always 30 seconds from missing my flights or train departures. I was always the passenger they shouted out for in the speakers at airports, "Will passenger ms Doe, ms Doe please check in at gate number 37 for flight BA346 to Kuala Lumpur". I can't count all the times it happened, worst time was in Spain when my plane had already taxed out and Iberia were kind enough to drive me out on a luggage lift.
All this happened due to the bad combination of procrastination and "last minute" thinking. Sometimes the latter is just a consequence of the former. Procrastination resultes in last-minute acting when you can't find any other motivation to do a thing, except for
outer force. The lack of inner drive, makes outer force necessary. Sometimes the two are really two different things, as was mostly the case for me.
For me, procrastination set in when I were about to do something boring, something I did not have an inner drive to do. Nobody has an inner drive for paper work. Few people have an inner drive for reading for an exam - it's the situation that makes it boring, even though the subject is interesting.
Last-minute thinking however was a bit different, at least to me. It was based on the erranous idea that "I have plenty of time" and the fact that I had a bad sense of time and planning. My behaviour got constantely reinforced, since it never resulted in any real problems. My friends were kind and waited. My school work and work was never a problem since at that level, it was far too easy for me anyway and the stress made me so efficient so I produced good stuff very fast. At the time, there was simply no outer limits that forced me to change, on the contrary my last-minute strategy always worked.
When I was a bit over 20, I decided I wanted to go to university. I didn't have the necessary 3-4 years of 2ndary highschool/college, since I had dropped out of primary school at 15, gone to art school 1 year and then started to live like a bum. In Sweden, you can read those 3-4 years in evening school, but that takes at least the same time, and I wasn't patient enough for that. Besides, that would have tied me up during the semesters and made my travelling impossible. So I decided to go up as a "privatist", which means you do a series of exams in each subject, and get the necessary grades. In my case, that meant written and oral exams in about 25 subjects. During this period, I went around for weeks and had antecipatory anxiety before every singe exam and every single deadline for written assignments, altogether perhaps 100 different occations. The only result of this, apart from unhealthy stress, was that I learned I could make it, with highest degree on all exams, although I only read the night before, or wrote a 5000 word assignment in 1.5 day without sleep. Very bad. It just meant more reinforcement for my behaviour, although I didn't realise that at the time, I just pondered why I was unable to change.
To be continued, the success story of how I changed...
