TED talks : Tim URBAN - Master of Procrastination

Hello everybody, today I'm going to talk about the video I've saw on TED. It talks about procrastination, a thing that concern everybody, at lest a little.

So, in that video, Tim Urban (a blogger) is talking about procrastination and try to describe it. To begin, he talks about his self-procrastination and the effect of his work. He said that that's pretty hard to do a regular work when you got a deadline, because if you're a procrastinator, you'll do the job like 2 days before the deadline, even if you had months to do it.

Then he presents his hypothesis that says brains of procrastinators are different than normal people's one. Normal people got a Rational Decision Maker (that he personify with a guy that is at the helm of your life and that takes the right decision for you at the right time), and procrastinators got the Rational Decision Maker too, but next to him there is also the Instant Gratification Monkey, that lives entirely in the present moment, with no memory of the past, no knowledge of the future and only care about "easy" and "fun". Which is pretty right by the way. Then he says that this instinct can be viable in a trivial world, which is not the case of our world.

Sometimes the Monkey and the RDM (Rational Decision Maker) are getting along well (when you got to do easy and funny stuff), but when we have to deal with harder and less pleasant things there is a conflict between them.
Moreover he calls the moment when you do leisure activities instead of working for example, a Dark Playground. Which can make you anxious, or feeling guilty. But there is a way to affraid the Monkey and to give back the control to the RDM : the deadline that create the Panic Monster. Because of the Panic Monster, you're going to be on time because he is going to remove the procrastination during a short period, by scaring the Monkey.

The problem is if you got no deadline, there's no Panic Monster, which isn't a good things because nothing force you to do what you have to. And he said something about that, something I found clever and scary at the same time : "That long-time procrastination has made them feel like spectators in their own lives. The frustration is not that they couldn't achieve their dreams, it's that they weren't even to start chasing them."