By Marco
At some point during one of those “awesome” experiences I realized that everything distracting me from my task was meaningless. In a normal scenario, it would have just been ignored. But I’m procrastinating. Procrastinating is not about leaving things for the last moment just because, nor about being bored. It is just that when you are procrastinating everything else becomes more interesting.
Now, that might sound simple or you might be thinking “WOW GENIUS”, but it was not that obvious before I thought about it. Lets assign numbers to the whole thing. On a scale of 0 to 10, 10 being very interesting and 0 being not interesting at all, the task that must be done is, for example, a 2. When the task is given, the rest of things become a 1, even things that were less than 1. That happens because one is conscious that something relatively important must be done, however, that doesn’t make the task look better nor be more interesting. The scale never changes, it stays the same through all the procrastination process. However, once one starts thinking seriously about doing the task, what once was more than 2 and now is nothing more than a 1, suddenly gets a plus 1.1, so in the international interest scale it ranks higher than the task.
Completing your task after procrastinating could be compared to drinking water after a long run on a hot day: you might feel exhausted when you are writing an essay for your English class at 1:00 in the morning. You procrastinated before by watching the third season of Malcolm In The Middle, but at the moment you finish that last paragraph, everything is perfect, and you share it with your teacher, you feel you can accomplish everything accomplishable in the world.
Procrastination has helped me discover myself more then I thought. Things that I never expected to be interesting ended up interesting while I was procrastinating. Don’t write that essay on Friday. Leave it for Saturday night or Sunday morning and look for cat videos instead.