Selective Procrastination

I’ve had a habit of procrastination since forever.

In medical school, I would always procrastinate reading a particular course or re-arrange my time table till I could do so no more. In fact, time tables never worked for me, if I managed to follow it for a week, the next week I would procrastinate.

And after all these years, in spite of all the motivational speeches I have heard and given, things haven’t changed.

It’s the sixth week in my current posting and I have started pushing everything I have to do till the seventh week. You know the seventh week of perfection, the beginning of the second half of the posting, the beginning of the end.

And I know there’s a good chance when I get to the seventh week, I may push them further to the tenth week when I will have only three weeks to go. I would convince myself that pressure is all I need to focus.

Because although I haven’t changed over the years from my procrastinating ways, I now know why I act the way I do. I procrastinate because I’m motivated by pressure and deadlines. I put things off to the last minute, I execute in less time than I envisaged due to adrenaline rush, I scale through, and I repeat the process.

I don’t know if I’ll ever change but I find that I don’t procrastinate so much when it comes to creating. Once I get an idea, I immediately jot it down and start pushing towards it. Take for example the new youtube channel I launched today, I conceived the idea about a month ago when I started writing these tales, and over the next two weeks, I had put plans in motion and set the ball rolling, and here we are.

Conclusively, I think what I have is selective procrastination that covers areas like reading, preparing work presentations, cooking and calling people, while sparing things like writing and surfing social media. I think I should be studied so that this my rare condition can be better explored. Or am I not alone? Do you also selectively procrastinate?

Talk soon,

ajidara

You can watch the video on my brand new channel here. I interviewed a patient who survived a ruptured ectopic pregnancy and a resident obstetrician.