I'll do it later

I feel like my posts have been few and far between in the past little while because that's how my sanity has been too. I also feel like my posts always begin with, or at least mention, something to do with me being busy. Yes, I am busy. I am ALWAYS doing something. Today was my first full day in the lab this week, which was nice for a change. The past few days have been all over the place. I am all about routines, and getting into one, but I find that I am struggling to do that this year. It is nearing the end of October, and I thought, I wonder how my goals have been going?  Those of you avid blog readers may remember I set some goals way back at the beginning of October. I can say with confidence, that I met NONE of them thus far, and in one weeks time, on the last day of October, I won't have met any of them still. Today was fairly productive in that I did read through several papers for my big competitive ability review. That being said, I probably could have easily doubled or tripled the number I did read, if I was capable of reading more efficiently and focusing. Focusing is a big thing for me. I will sit down to accomplish something and end up wasting half of the time just surfing the net, or literally staring into space. Another issue is that as I read papers, I zone out, and suddenly realize I just read a paper, and couldn't tell you a thing that happened in it. When I am less productive than I anticipate, I just say that I will finish my work at home, and then never do.


Why do I do this? How do I do it?


Here are some ideas I am going to test out:

• Not reading articles on the computer, and physically closing the laptop when I am trying to read. Hand  in hand with this is putting the cell phone away. 
• No work is done, unless it's done at my desk, in my office. It never happens anywhere else, so why do I expect that to change? 
• Working in a clean environment. When I get stressed, I get messy. I leave things everywhere. If you saw my apartment right now, you would die, same with my desk. Then what happens is as I attempt to do work, I think, I could clean instead, and off I go. It's a vicious cycle. 

I totally realize I am not the only person who does this. Procrastination  distraction is pretty much ingrained in our culture, especially younger people. It really got me thinking about procrastination from any evolutionary stand point? Why do we wait until the last minute, when we know that isn't the right thing to do? Studies have shown that the longer you wait to do something, the lower the quality it will end up being, especially for students, but again, we keep on doing it. 

I just procrastinated in finishing this post, and  I came across a really interesting blog post on Study Hacks called "the procrastinating caveman". It argues that a common reason for putting things off, or procrastinating, is that our brains don't believe our plans. They say that our brains have evolved to evaluate the plans that we make and then assess them and decide to accept or reject them. They use the example of a student that knows they should be studying for an exam, and they aren't. Why is this? It's because they don't really have a good, solid plan. Maybe their plan is to spend all night studying, but their brain will reject that plan as not sound and thus, they put off doing it. I thought this was super interesting. Check out the link I embedded as the whole post offers way more than I summarized here. 

So I guess on that note I should go make a solid plan of attack...maybe later.