Inside The Mind Of A Master Procrastinator By Tim Urban Summary

Tim Urban: Inside the mind of a master procrastinator
Students who are in college usually have to write a fair amount of papers. A normal student will spread the work out, so that if he does a small amount of work in the first week(s) and some heavier working later on, everything gets done and everything will stay civil. Tim describes how he would not uphold this system, but rather wait until the last moment to do everything and get things done that way. This worked, until the day he had to write a thesis containing 90 pages, a paper you are supposed to work a year on. The idea was to start up light and gradually build op the amount of work to be done by the end of the year. The first months came and went, and he hadn’t written a word and this
The monkey is not somebody you want to be in charge, it lives entirely in the present, has no memory of the past and no knowledge of the future, it only cares about two things: fun and easy. This will work for animals and humans in tribal time, but we are no longer in tribal times. The rational decision-maker gives us the ability to visualise the future, see the big picture and make long turn plans, so it wants to make us do what makes sense at this moment, so it will help us in the future. Here is where conflict arises, and for the procrastinator, the conflict will (most likely) result in him/her giving in to the monkey. The “fun” here is not actually fun as it is filled with feelings of guilt and self-hatred. Luckily, the procrastinator has something to get him out of that mind-set, and it is called the “panic monster”. The panic monster is not present mostly, but will wake up every time a deadline comes near. This monster is the only thing the monkey is afraid of, thus the only thing that will help get rid of said monkey. When the panic monster comes in the picture, the mind-set will change in such a way that the procrastinator will (suddenly) get to work at a pace most people only dream of, but this work will most likely
Even though it sounds simple enough, it was such hard work that Judson would get exhausted. Why is so hard to pay attention? Studies show that, even if you try hard to pay attention, half of the time you will get an urge to check your mail or respond to a text. Turns out we are fighting one of the most evolutionary conserved learning processes, also known as a “reward based” learning process. We see food that looks good, and our brain goes: calories, survival. We eat the food, tastes good and our brain says: remember this food and where you found it. See food, eat food, feel good, repeat; trigger, behaviour, reward. After a while our (creative) brain will not connect it to remembering where the food is; but instead say, why don’t you, the next time you feel bad, eat some tasty food; as tasty foods make you feel good. Same process, different trigger. Instead of a physical signal, you now get an emotional signal, triggering you to eat. Same goes for smoking or drinking alcohol. After a while, stressful situations will trigger the feeling of you wanting something sweet or wanting a cigarette. What of, instead of fighting our brains, we tapped into this process, but add a twist. What if we got curious about what was happening in the momentarily experience. Seeing what we get from our habits helps us understand them at a deeper level. In this way