Life: Designed

The Procrastinator

Twenty-four hours in a day hardly feels like enough. I wake up in the morning ready for the day, full of ambition and full of goals. Some days are pretty good. I feel productive. I check most tasks off my mental to-do list. Other days? Not so much. I hardly get anything done and go to bed feeling like I’ve wasted a day. 

When I was talking to my hairstylist during my last haircut, she brought up how she spends hours watching hair videos on social media and convinces herself she’s doing it to get inspiration. I do the same thing with design videos. We both know it’s a lie. We’re just stuck doomscrolling like everybody else. I’ll bookmark videos, saying I’ll come back to them for inspiration or tips. How could I use them to help me on a new project, though, when all I ever seem to be doing is”looking for inspiration?” 

We’re not alone in procrastinating; in fact, a survey conducted by Talker Research revealed that “71% of Americans are guilty of procrastinating,” and of that number, 42% use “scrolling through social media to avoid their to-do list.” A significant percentage of us are putting off things we should be or would rather be doing, and we can’t stop. Every moment of procrastination chips away at the day, leaving less and less time for productivity.

The Multitasker

I feel like I’ve spent my entire life doing a million things at a time. I’m always thinking about what’s next on the agenda for the day and how quickly I can finish whatever I’m working on now to get to the next thing. I’m always multitasking in one way or another… but multitasking isn’t real. According to Earl Miller, an award-winning neuroscientist and professor at MIT, “Your brain can only produce one or two thoughts” at a time. No matter how much we believe we’re multitasking, we’re just switching from one task to another. Like me right now, switching from writing this blog post to checking my phone. According to the American Psychological Association, “brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40 percent of someone’s productive time.” Switching from one task to another makes you more prone to errors, less productive, and, over time, drags your attention span through the mud. 

I’ve always been slowing myself down by doing a million things at once. The more I go on, the more I am kicking myself in the foot. I can’t actually use my design inspiration because I’m interrupting myself from actually starting the project my heart is longing to create, stopping myself before I even start. As Professor Gloria Mark explained to Johann Hari in his book Stolen Focus, “if you have spent long enough being interrupted in your daily life, you will start to interrupt yourself even when you are set free from all these external interruptions.” That is exactly what I am doing. I have no distractions around me, but here I am, I’m creating them. I check my phone and I Google whatever random thought pops into my head. I wake up in the morning ready to create, but I push it off and push it off until there truly is no more time left in the day.

uninterrupting My Self

It’s not my first time recognizing this pattern. I want to stop and reclaim my time. I am taking baby steps because that’s just what I need to do to make real progress. I’m thinking of my journey as a graduate student as another step on the journey to stopping distractions. One week in, I am already learning about why I’ve been interrupting myself for years. Through exercises like the New York Times’ focus test that tasks you to do nothing except spend 10 minutes staring at a painting, I’m learning to hold off from interrupting myself. “There’s no right or wrong way to do this,” the exercise tells you as it starts. I find that imperative for this entire journey. There is no right way, no wrong way, as long as progress is made. 

To make progress in my everyday life, I resist the urge to chat or pick up my phone while doing work. Even though sometimes I fail. I am trying to read a chapter of my book every night. Even though sometimes, instead, I scroll until I cannot keep my eyes open long enough to read a single sentence. Every step taken is progress. I just have to keep reminding myself that.

Come with me as I design my life, as a life: uninterrupted.