THE THIEF OF TIME

Many of us go through life with an array of uncompleted tasks, nibbling at our conscience. How serious, in your opinion, is the problem of procrastination? To what extent can it adversely impact on your academic performance?

Exams are just around the corner, and you haven’t even started working on your term paper. You still have a long way to go! Snowed under with work? Buried under the avalanche of texts to be read? Deluged with relentless phone calls, inundated with a never-ending stream of papers and emails? Congratulations! You are a procrastinator! The episode from college life seems so excruciatingly familiar. The vast majority of college students procrastinate, and academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to put things off.

English abounds in words and expressions that name this phenomenon: if you procrastinate, you delay, you put off, you postpone doing things that should be done unavoidably! You dilly-dally, you dawdle, you drag your feet….

Procrastination is commonly defined as a deliberate attempt to avoid doing things that need to be done and indulging in other, much more enjoyable activities instead. By and large, a fully-fledged or ‘red-blooded’ procrastinator postpones dealing with anything – no matter how necessary or urgent it may be – because they find the task either insignificant or annoying. If the task seems too complicated, overwhelming and time-consuming to them, it stands a good chance of being postponed. They usually justify their behaviour by saying they need to wait for inspiration. Sounds like a lame excuse, doesn’t it? They put things off till tomorrow saying they don’t feel like doing it and genuinely intend to do it. However, tomorrow they feel even less like doing it! David Allen, the author of the best-selling time-management book “Getting Things Done”, lays great emphasis on classification and definition: the vaguer the task, the less likely you are to finish it!

Ignorance might also affect procrastination through what the scientists call “the planning fallacy”. It means that people tend to underestimate the time it will take them to complete a given task, partly because they fail to take account of how long it took them to complete similar projects in the past, and partly because they rely on smooth scenario in which accidents or unforeseen problems never occur. As a matter of fact, there is a whole range of problems you predictably have to deal with in your everyday life. Pretending that you won’t have any interruptions to your work is a typical illustration of the planning fallacy.

The reason why people procrastinate is not that they are shortsighted or shallow but that their preferences aren’t consistent over time: short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals. Our desires shift as the long run becomes the short run. Lack of confidence, sometimes alternating with unrealistic dreams of heroic success, often leads to procrastination, and many studies suggest that procrastinators are self-handicappers: rather than risk failure, they prefer to create conditions that make success impossible, a reflex that of course creates a vicious cycle. Procrastinators are also given to excessive planning, as if only the ideal battle plan were worth acting on. Procrastinators often succumb to this sort of perfectionism.

If you are prone to procrastinate, if you are hopelessly bad at anticipating problems, and you are painfully aware of your drawbacks and vulnerabilities, working flexitime is definitely not a healthy option for you. You should bear in mind that problems have a nasty habit of cropping up out of the blue and taking you by surprise. So, to avoid being caught off guard, make sure you jot down a list of jobs to do on a daily basis, prioritize them ruthlessly deciding which tasks you have to accomplish that day, set yourself rigorous time limits and stick to your schedule, in spite of any unexpected, even the most unwelcome, interruptions and intrusions. This will enable you to overcome any obstacles in your way and prevent anything from interfering with your work. Otherwise you risk falling behind with your work and failing to meet the deadline, which in the long run may bring about your dismissal.

Whether one can be cured of the disease known as procrastination is still unclear. For the time being, what about a cup of coffee…..?

GRAMMAR FOCUS: ATTRIBUTIVE CLAUSES

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14