I have become an expert procrastinator. I think I started this blog as a means of procrastination; anything to get out of doing anything important that demanded my full undivided attention.
There are small things throughout my day that tend to "command my attention." Let’s call them unexpected distractions. This can be a completely harmless check up of my extremely thriving and exciting social media. Someone’s perfectly filtered and cleverly captioned lunch post leads to me incessantly stalking my cousin’s, boyfriend’s, friend’s, auntie’s, sister’s account, all because she has a pair of boots I considered buying on ASOS the week before (and in all honesty, they weren’t as nice in real life.)
I don’t know if this is procrastination or boredom or just pure self destruction, but there is something so appealing about going for a run, knowing full well you have an assignment due the next morning. I guess it’s the only time I implement exercise into my life, so it’s not wholly harmful. It runs in the family (punny). It’s actually not just me. I phoned mum earlier this week who told me she was cleaning the "spare bedroom” (the now empty back room that has become a shrine dedicated to my life almost as though I have passed away), all because she was avoiding doing her taxes.
Maybe we’re just easily distracted? Studies show that the human attention span is only eight seconds. In that case, I bet half of you haven’t even gotten this far into my blog. We get bored quickly and so we move on. We lose interest. We end up doing nothing we intended. We begin to forget things quicker. I put a glass bottle in the freezer for ten minutes (please don’t comment) so that I could have some nice cold water. (Impatience meant that I couldn’t wait for the fridge to cool the glass bottle). Either way, I forgot about it. I probably then decided to go do the thing I had put off doing in the first place. And Left it in there the whole night. Later the next day, in pursuit of a sizeable bowl of Vanilla ice cream, I rediscovered the aftermath of a catastrophically frosty explosion that resulted in an hour of clearing, cleaning and differentiating shards of broken glass from sharp ice particles. Frustration lead to a Tesco bag full of frozen segments, microscopic pieces of glass and some rather questionable chicken.
Anyway, ironically off the point…
Focus isn’t always my strong point. I’ve been thinking. (I know… dangerous). I often wonder why am I so distracted all the time? Why do I procrastinate so much? It’s not because I don’t care, because I do. My mother has too strong a vision of her French Manor situated on the outskirts of Paris for me to not care and not to succeed.
I been thinking about it a lot recently. We put way too much pressure on ourselves. We all do it. We expect the best for ourselves. We expect the best from ourselves. So much so that we sometimes avoid even doing certain things because we’re almost so afraid to get them wrong. Or maybe we’re too scared to actually commit to something. Or we’re not actually sure ourselves what we want to achieve. My UCAS university application took months to complete. I kept putting it off because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was scared to make the wrong choice. I was sp scared to press send and commit that I avoided the process all together. (I equally did not want to part with the application fee)
Dawn French said in one of her recent shows that she wished she had a pause button, and voila, the whole world would stop. This would give her some time to write the things she needed to. Maybe catch up on some sleep. Read some more. Stop for a second and really think. Allow herself all the time in the world. And then press play and slip back into society. Wouldn’t it be great?
Why do we continuously put unnecessary pressure on ourselves to be perfect. I make mistakes. I left my English A-Level folder in a bar one (harmless) evening and now cannot find it! Yes… ok, I understand that’s bad but I beat myself up over things I cannot control or because I didn’t meet these ridiculous expectations that I set for myself. I went to bed at 8pm last night and honestly was the best decision I have ever made. I typically would stress over my coursework, stalk more people on Instagram, do nothing productive and then realise it’s almost 3am. It’s actually a vicious cycle of me being miserable and sarcastic the next day, all because I’ve slept four hours and couldn’t prioritise and let myself off the hook. It doesn’t all have to be done today. We all know the feeling.
Let’s lighten the load. Cut ourselves some slack. Maybe then we wouldn’t keep avoiding the things we needed to do and we’d actually enjoy and utilise the time we have to ourselves.
Much Love,
Lil