Are you a procrastinator??

To answer my own question, yes, I am a procrastinator. And do you know why we procrastinate? Wouldn't the world be better off without procrastination? Hell to the yes. Without procrastination, things would actually get done. Things like the dishes, cleaning up after yourself, moving your furniture out of my room, bringing the kitchen appliances you keep promising to bring. Oh wait, that's just my roommates.

I find that procrastination happens because of two major reasons. ONE is that you're afraid that you can't do your best and might possibly fail. TWO is that you do not associate your future self with your current self (aka, you are a self-preservative creature, but you subconsciously treat your future self as a different person and disregard the consequences of your actions because they won't affect you, they'll affect your future self).

The FIRST reason has to do with the fact that many of us have an innate fear of failure. For example, I put off writing about this topic for a long time because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to properly get across what I wanted to say. So maybe you've put off starting a paper or a novel because you don't feel prepared to write a stellar first sentence. Maybe you've held off on starting an exercise regime because you don't think you're ready to stick to it.

The thing is about this first reason is that it's completely unfounded. Doubting yourself and putting it off isn't gonna make you better - just going out there and doing it will. 

For the longest time, I had a DeviantArt account that I was totally flaky with. I would upload pieces just to take them down after a day or not upload them at all because I was afraid I wasn't good enough to have my art shown to the Internet. It created in me a lot more self-doubt. See, it's like an endless cycle. Now, I force myself not to take anything down from my account, and I've greatly improved because of it.

NaNoWriMo is also a good example of why this first reason is bull. During NaNo, I forced myself to write 50,000 words of a novel in one month. That leaves no time for looking back, only plowing forward. Sure, those 50,000 words are incredibly rough and unedited, but if I had had the time to look back and be critical of my writing, there's no way I would have been able to write so much so quickly.

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