NotJustGenes

A post about procrastination from a person who actually knows what she’s talking about

I’m sure all of you have seen at least one of those posts where people who cleary aren’t procrastinators tell you to ‘just stop procrastinating’ or ‘to focus on your goals’ or ‘get a grip’. Saying stuff like that to actual procrastinators is like telling someone if they want to fly, all they have to do is to just look at the sky and waggle their arms.

This post, on the other hand, is about helping you to understand what the problem is and what you can do to change it. I was in therapy for procrastination and I’ll share with you what worked for me. Everything I tell and recommend you here is based on my own experience and research.

First of all, let me tell you one thing. Procrastination is not laziness. It’s as simple as that. Being lazy is a bad habit, procrastinating is a serious mental problem.

WHAT IS PROCRASTINATION

In my own words: procrastination is the inability to do stuff. Stuff you don’t want to do as well as stuff you do want to do. And not because you’re lazy, not because you don’t have enough time, but because you simply cannot bring yourself to do it. It’s not fun, it’s not relaxing - it’s terrible. 

Besides the huge pile of unrealistic shit, there are some good articles out there that actually explain what procrastination is. Tim Urban wrote a series of blog posts about this [x x x] on wait but why in which he does a really good job of describing and explaining what procrastination is all about. 

In another really good article by David Cain I found a quote that struck me to the core because it was so true.

You see, procrastinators tend to be people who have, for whatever reason, developed to perceive an unusually strong association between their performance and their value as a person. This makes failure or criticism disproportionately painful, which leads naturally to hesitancy when it comes to the prospect of doing anything that reflects their ability — which is pretty much everything.

I urge you to read that article. It’s a very sensible approach to what procrastination is and how it develops as a behavioral pattern.

HOW TO BEAT PROCRASTINATION

The first thing you need to understand is to face this issue, is that it’s not going to go away. It is something that you’ll have to face every day. But it will also get easier every time you face it.

start small - The task my therapist gave my was to do 45 minutes of studying a day. Not even one hour. And believe me, I struggled a lot with this. Doing something (i.e. stuying) every day is hard, so don’t sabotage yourself with taking on too much to soon. Some sense of achievement is essential for your motivation to keep fighting.

plan ahead (but not too far) - like you probably all know, planing and breaking down tasks is, like, the most important thing if you want to achieve something. But the thing is, if you plan for two weeks in advance, the amount of tasks waiting for you will overwhelm you. For me personally, planing two or three days in advence works best. You can always experiment a bit to find out what works best for you.

starting ritual - this one of the most important things my therapist taught me. Develop a ritual to get you started. Starting is the hardest part and to help yourself with it, do a few tasks to get you in the right mindset for studying. Shut off your phone, make some tea, tell your bestie you’re studying now, wipe your desk clean, light a candle, prepare some snacks. Do whatever works for you. Be consistent with it and do it every time before you start studying. But! These rituals are not aloud take more than 10-15 minutes because if they’re longer, they will turn into a procrastination habit.

talk to yourself - I’m serious. You need to understand that only you decide what you’re doing. And sometimes, you need to tell yourself that. Out loud. It sounds strange, but it works wonders. (My personal mantra is ‘Only I decide what I do with my time. I am the one who decides what I do.’)

forgive yourself - you’re not always going to win. there will be days where you fight and fight yourself but you still loose. Those days feel terrible, but please try to remember that it’s okay. Don’t beat yourself up about it. Just tell yourself that you will:

start again - maybe you lost a day, maybe a week, maybe a month. The point is: it doesn’t matter. All that matters is starting again. It might be harder than you remember, but getting up again is the most importat part.

I didn’t include tipps on how to actually study in this post because there are so many people out there who can tell you about this a lot better than I ever could. I’ll link you to some of my favorites here, here and here. 

Today we had a case presentation with the pulmonologist at the hospital and he presented a case from the early 1990′s that had imaging that looked like this. Apparently, before tuberculosis meds were available, tuberculosis was treated with plombage - surgically inserting lucite balls (or other foreign objects) into the pleural cavity in order to intentionally collapse the lung. The theory was it allowed the lung to heal quicker, or that the hypoxemia killed the TB, or maybe, that it would be a fun way to really baffle medical students 60 years later.

We have a term for menial labor here in the medical world. We call it scut. 

Scut work can be any manner of busywork: things like tracking down records, calling the lab, calling the pharmacy, scheduling a follow up at hospital discharge, and a million other little tasks that require no particular medical knowledge but are integral to the day to day care of patients. Scut work is often the domain of medical students but nobody is immune. Interns to attendings all partake in the scutty tasks of the day. And nurses. Oh the amount of scut nurses do. 

A somewhat uncomfortable truth I’ve really come to appreciate in the last 6+ years is that medicine is scut work. Many people seem unaware of this when they decide to pursue a health care career. 

Sure there’s exciting moments and gratifying patient interactions. But the TV portrayal of medicine is gratuitously inaccurate. It’s fewer emergent chest tubes and more calling maintenance to figure out where the hell your patient’s blood is when the tube system breaks. It’s less open cardiac massage and more wondering why the EMR refuses to E-prescribe tylenol. Soft admits and crappy consults are bread and butter scut everywhere. 

But if there’s a second truth that I’ve learned it’s that scut matters.