The Question to Eternal Productivity
Scheduling; prioritising and more.
I recently started watching Ali Abdal regularly. This was part of a two-pronged approach to get life in order. This way I could get my daily youtube fix, and something good might come of it. It was certainly better than watching parkour videos, and maybe I could finally do something productive, over the huge bloc of free time that has now opened in front of me. It’s working, albeit slowly. I still find it hard to focus on a particular task for an extended period of time. Nevertheless, I’ve quit some old habits and started some new ones.
I’ll give you two things I have learned from those videos and have applied in life over the last month. The first one is that “You are in complete control of your time”. Every time you decide to do something,(or not do something) you are actively assigning time for certain tasks. You had time, but you chose not to do it is more fitting. Secondly, “your brain is for having ideas and not storing them”. I don’t really know how medically, or psychologically accurate this is. But it works for me. Written To-do lists, blog ideas, and schedules all have helped me get some things done.
Watching Ali Abdal, and similar YouTubers have filled my youtube feed with similar videos, and a large chunk of these videos are about beating procrastination. Procrastination is real, hence I sat about to think about from the perspective of a university student.
I have thought a lot about procrastination, especially when I used to be at university. More than once, I have made decisions to escape the cycle, but like my every other decision, I decided to sleep on it before putting it into action. And every morning brings new issues to deal with & yesterdays decisions get lost among them.
But thinking about in a rather utilitarian perspective, I have come to a conclusion that procrastinating is the best way to go about in college.
So why do we want to not procastinate in college. Mostly because it’s because work piles up in the end, and you’ll have to work your ass off in the final weeks of the semester; maybe even submit substandard assignments. But I think practically this whole Idea is flawed. Everyone who’s been to college knows that the last weeks of your semester, or academic year are crazy.
Everyone is running around, the crowd in the sports field thins out, space becomes scarce in the library, lights stay on in the classrooms well after midnight and some phones remain silent through the week. But if you are jobless and have developed a sense of observation, you’ll know that everyone has this phase. Even people who work through the semester are caught in this frenzy. Dosen’t this make the habit of working trough the week a bit redundant?
How much ever you optimise your life, the last weeks of the semester barely give your time for an occasional smoke(Smoking is Injurious to Health. A part of my hate qouta is reserved for smokers and drinkers). Social events around the university are non-existent. So even if you are done with all your work, there is nothing you can do. You might as well have gone to social stuff in the early periods and worked now, rather than getting everything done then and being jobless now. Honestly the busiest people are those who seem to work through the semester, the ones who text you well in advance when a group assignment is due.
But procrastination is real, and it should be dealt with accordingly. Nevertheless, I am at cross roads about this now. When you choose not do something that has to be done in the future, are procrastinating, scheduling or prioritising. I am yet to get a real-world response to this question. Let me know if you ever answer this question to eternal productivity; and'I’ll let you know if I find some answers.
Until next time.
I couldn’t watch the semi-finals of the World Cup. Morocco lost, that was disheartening, but it was coming all the way. Great campaign team.