THE THIEF OF TIME

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! The episode from college life seems so excruciatingly familiar. 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 vast majority of college students procrastinate, and academics, who work for long periods in a ………………..…………… fashion, may be especially …………………. 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 ……………………….. attempt to avoid doing things that need to be done and ……………………….in other, much more enjoyable activities instead. By and large, a fully-fledged or ‘red-blooded’ procrastinator ……………………….. 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 ……………………… a good chance of being postponed. They usually ……………………. their behaviour by saying they need to wait for inspiration. Sounds like a …………………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 …………………… on classification and definition: the ……………the task, the less likely you are to finish it!

Ignorance might also …………………. procrastination through what the scientists call “the planning …………………….”. It means that people tend ………………………. 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 …………………scenario in which accidents or unforeseen problems never…………………... 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 ……………………… over time: short-term considerations ……………………… 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…………………………..: rather than risk failure, they prefer to create conditions that make success impossible, a reflex that of course creates a ……………… …………….. of persistent failure and delay. Procrastinators are also given to excessive planning, as if only the ideal battle plan were………………. acting on. Procrastinators often ……………………… to this sort of perfectionism.

If you are prone to procrastinate, if you are hopelessly bad at ……………………… problems, and you are painfully ………………….. of your drawbacks and vulnerabilities, working flexitime is definitely not a healthy …………………….. for you. You should …………….. in mind that problems have a nasty habit ………………………. out of the ………………. and taking you by ……………….. So, to avoid ………………………. off guard, make sure you jot down a list of jobs to do on a daily………………….., ……………………….. them ruthlessly deciding which tasks you have to accomplish that day, ……………….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 …………… …………..….. with your work and ………………….. the deadline, which in the long ……………….may bring about your dismissal.

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

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14