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Why Do Procrastinate

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Hanming Zeng

Why We Procrastinate

It is hard to deny that most of us are procrastinators. We hand in our assignments exactly on the due day. We rarely pay our bills on time. We miss the opportunity for buying the cheapest? ticket for Broadway show. We do not start our Christmas shopping until Christmas Eve…

Procrastination is a curse to modern people. Every body knows that it is a hindrance on the way toward success. But we still deliberately postpone our job in spite of knowing this fact. Why is the evilness of procrastination so powerful? Is there anything under the curse? What on earth makes us procrastinate?

People tend to avoid the job they dislike. For most of us, a lack of motivation plays a major role in keeping us away from focusing on our tasks. When we are assigned with something that are not interesting to us, we cultivate a listless attitude towards them. We are reluctant to even think about them. Even when we start our job, we constantly get distracted, especially ones that do not take lots of commitment on their part. Checking what’s up on Facebook group or our email perfectly satisfy this purpose. We assume we won’t waste much time on those unrelated things but actually we do. By clicking a link on Facebook page, we are attracted to thousands other links on it. By entering the e-mail box, even if there’s nothing new, we can’t help but start deleting the past spams. Why? We are simply avoiding something that we are not motivated to do.

On the other hand, we procrastinators fear making mistakes. We worship perfectionism and it directly leads to procrastination. Oftentimes, procrastination is a sign of fear of making mistakes. We sometimes have extremely high or unrealistic expectations of ourselves that hinder us to undertake tasks. We often put off simple tasks because our standard for completing those tasks are high and beyond reach.

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