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 [xxx] 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.
I really hope this post was helpful for some of you. If you are battling procrastination, please know that you’re not alone. It will get easier, but I still struggle, too. If you want someone to talk to, my inbox is always open.
Linguee is a sort of dictionary filled with examples and sentences from all over the internet so you can look up individual phrases or words and see how they’re used and in what contexts.
So if you want to type in an actual phrase or something in English or Spanish (or a different language if you pick it) you can see your words used in sentences and see how actual sentences look… rather than relying on Google Translate to mess up the grammar or false cognates.
And more than that, you can also check the sources they take the example sentences from.
I highly recommend Linguee for people who are trying to figure out specific phrases rather than particular words (which I would use WordReference for).
Linguee is a god send!
Linguee is bomb!
My French teacher introduced me to Linguee and it really is spectacular!
Want to make this brush? Just make a perfect circle and save it (I call mine “round”) and use it as the bitmap, and copy the settings above. It works pretty nicely 😀
aHHHH HOLY SHIT WHEN DID THIS POST START TRENDING?!
*If English is not your native language, you can download it in other languages.
Please download from the official FireAlpaca websites, because a friend of mine simply googled FireAlpaca and downloaded from some random site, and she got malware! So PLEASE be careful.
FireAlpaca has a suggestion/bug reporting box on their site so you can request features, or let them know if you’re having any issues! Also FireAlpaca works fantastically on Mac computers! (though I will say the only time FA has crashed on me is when I used a Mac, so PLEASE save your work often)
Also, please visit these tumblrs if you do get into using FireAlpaca:
I know I said I was going to do this tomorrow, but well, I could’ve sworn it was much earlier when I drank that Coke but turns out it was already eight in the evening so no sleep for me for awhile yet. Figured I may as well write this up. Now, all this information is stuff I’ve gleaned from years of TV watching, friends in the industry, and being an artist/author who has had to do some basic research on systems like these. If any of it is incorrect, please let me know and I’ll fix it. Feel free to add-on as well.
TV ratings are a rather complicated system, especially now that networks are beginning to expand where they gather data from when it comes to determining the popularity of different shows. There’s also no hard and fast formula for what makes good ratings. Supernatural has totally different ratings than The Walking Dead, but both are still going strong on TV with no end in sight for either. Even on the same network there’s no hard and fast rule. Take ABCFamily, which is where Shadowhunters will air; Pretty Little Liars averaged just over three million viewers over the summer, while many of their other shows averaged less but still got renewed.
Point is, every show has different goals when it comes to viewership. Goals for one aren’t necessarily the same as goals for others. We can’t just get to X amount of viewers and be assured that the show will continue. There are some things that can help our chances though. Ratings staying stable or, even better, rising as the season goes on are one of the best ways. Here’s a simple breakdown of how those ratings work:
The most common method of measuring TV ratings in the US and Canada is the Nielsen system which measures the number of people watching shows and makes the information available to various companies. Nielsen uses a sample audience representative of the whole population, then uses those numbers from the sample audience to determine total viewership across the country as well as basic demographics like viewer age.
Basically, Nielsen installs special set-box monitors on select TVs to monitor what is being watched. So if–for simple math’s sake–1,000 out of 5,000 households with their boxes watches a show it is assumed 1/5 of the total population with access to a TV watched that show. These boxes are also set to allow different members of a household to indicate when they are watching to allow better demographic information on watchers.
Who gets these boxes is picked at random, and there is no way to sign up for a box. There’s been criticism for the system because of this and other reasons including the system struggling to adapt to modern viewing methods like DVRs, smartphones, tablets, etc. They have started expanding to measuring online viewership in the last couple years though, which is good. There’s also criticism because their sample size is roughly 3,000 households when it’s estimated there’s over 100-million households in the US with TVs–and that is an INCREDIBLY small sample size. However it is still the predominant measuring system for TV Ratings.
Essentially, if you don’t have one of these boxes it technically doesn’t matter if you watch or not when it comes to Nielsen ratings. Which is annoying, given that there are much better ways to gather statistical data with today’s technology. But it’s what we’ve got.
Now, with all of that said, there are other ways to show support for a show. ABCF especially has been paying strong attention to Twitter as of late. Nearly every episode of a show has a hashtag displayed on the screen, and they frequently re-air episodes within a week and display tweets from during the original run on screen during the re-run. Many times they’ll even have different hashtags for different events on the show. How much they monitor and use this data from twitter is unclear, but it clearly does mean SOMETHING to them otherwise they wouldn’t do it. The Shadowhunters crew specifically has also shown great attention to twitter, which I’m sure will continue once the show airs.
So, if you want to support the show here’s some easy ways to do it:
If you have a Nielsen box then watch, watch, watch. Nielsen monitors DVRs as well, so if you can’t watch because of another show or not being home just set your DVR. They’ve begun monitoring online streaming services as well, so if you want to help even more you can re-watch the next day on Hulu or something of that sort.
If you have a friend/family member with a Nielsen box, get them to watch. Or borrow their TV for yourself in exchange for cookies. Everyone loves cookies.
If you aren’t a Nielsen watcher you can watch the show on the ABCFamily website the next day and, I believe, these numbers are counted outside the Nielsen ratings as they are monitored by ABCF themselves.
If you ever watch an episode outside of a traditional TV do everything possible to watch it through an official source like Hulu or the ABCF website.
Tweet when the show is on. From what I recall of TV networks that monitor twitter, they generally count tweets in a two to three hour window around the air-time of the show. Because of timezones this generally means there’s around four to five hours of twitter activity being counted as the show moves from the East Coast to the West Coast of the US.
Help out our international friends who won’t have access to the show yet. Let them know the night’s hashtags (usually displayed on the screen during the show, but generally it’s just the show’s title) and when the show is starting/ending so they can easily tweet as well and show international support. Don’t spoil anyone though, and don’t share any spoilery hashtags that come up!
Engage with the Shadowhunters social media and general ABCF media even when the show isn’t airing. A consistently strong fandom can really help a show stand out from just being measured by its Nielsen ratings.
Let your friends know about the show, and about all of the above ways to support it.
Given the fast rise of Shadowhunters on social media (we’ve already got way more twitter followers than several ABCF shows, and that was before we even got a single cast member) we’re off to a really good start, I think. We’ve just got to keep that momentum going.
I’ve been studying the classic black tie dress code (mainly from here) so I thought I could share my notes. Maybe they can be helpful to someone else, too. If I made any mistakes or things are really confusing please tell me. I also have some notes on white tie which I could share as well…
lanablack 