I have struggled with procrastination my entire life. I feel like it has held me back from performing at my full potential and despite the years of feeling this way, I have never been able to quit my habit. This lesson has provided the most hope for potential change that I have ever experienced. The TED talks seemed to speak directly to me, I never realized how much control the instant gratification monkey has on my life. With each new slide I found more and more information on how to combat my procrastination and take back control over my life. Somewhere along the line, I realized that my procrastination was caused by to main factors. I am both constantly distracted by my phone and deathly afraid of failure. When an important assignment is coming up, instead of preparing or starting the work days in advance, I will get so scared of failing the assignment that I will escape into my phone where I don’t have to worry about my own life. I will spend hours and hours disengaged from reality and then rush to get everything done last minute.
In order to combat this, I will be using the new tools and strategies that I learned in this weeks lesson. I will utilize my new google calendar to plan and adhere to a healthy schedule where I get my work done in little chunks at a time and still have other time to accomplish other personal goals that I’ve set for myself. I have removed all of the non essential apps from my phone and I now have my distracting apps blocked until 10 pm every night. This allows me to get more accomplished during the day and still enjoy leisure activities at night after I’ve finished everything I had to do.