Why Procrastinators Procrastinate. PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview.) pro-cras-ti-na-tion |prəˌkrastəˈnāSHən, prō-| noun the action of delaying or postponing something: your first tip is to avoid procrastination. Who would have thought that after decades of struggle with procrastination, the dictionary, of all places, would hold the solution. Avoid procrastination. While we’re here, let’s make sure obese people avoid overeating, depressed people avoid apathy, and someone please tell beached whales that they should avoid being out of the ocean.
No, “avoid procrastination” is only good advice for fake procrastinators—those people that are like, “I totally go on Facebook a few times every day at work—I’m such a procrastinator!” The thing that neither the dictionary nor fake procrastinators understand is that for a real procrastinator, procrastination isn’t optional—it’s something they don’t know how to not do. Pretty normal, right? Notice anything different? Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think.
We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing.
Buy it here. Part 1: Meet Your Mammoth The first day I was in second grade, I came to school and noticed that there was a new, very pretty girl in the class—someone who hadn’t been there the previous two years. Her name was Alana and within an hour, she was everything to me. When you’re seven, there aren’t really any actionable steps you can take when you’re in love with someone. But for me, it became suddenly relevant a few months later, when during recess one day, one of the girls in the class started asking each of the boys, “Who do youuu want to marry?”
Disaster. I was still new to being a human and didn’t realize that the only socially acceptable answer was, “No one.” The second I answered, the heinous girl ran toward other students, telling each one, “Tim said he wants to marry Alana!” The news quickly got back to Alana herself, who stayed as far away from me as possible for days after. Part 2: Taming the Mammoth No. Optimising the Performance of the Human Mind: Steve Peters at TEDxYouth@Manchester 2012. 10 Psychology Tricks You Can Use To Influence People. Before we get started, it’s important to note that none of these methods fall under what we would term the dark arts of influencing people.
Anything that might be harmful to someone in any way, especially to their self esteem, is not included here. These are ways to win friends and influence people using psychology without being a jerk or making someone feel bad. Trick: Get someone to do a favor for you—also known as the Benjamin Franklin effect. Legend has it that Benjamin Franklin once wanted to win over a man who didn’t like him. He asked the man to lend him a rare book and when the book was received he thanked him graciously. Scientists decided to test this theory and found that those who were asked by the researcher for a personal favor rated the researcher much more favorably than the other groups did.
Trick: Ask for way more than you want at first then scale it back later. This trick is sometimes known as the door in the face approach. Trick: Mirror their behavior.