Mind of procrastinator works in an interesting way, very well captured by Tim Urban in this humorous and one of the best TED talks. Highly recommended.
Instant gratification monkey and the panic monster
With so many platforms to procrastinate available to us at our finger tips, many of us have got that instant gratification monkey in our minds who spontaneously takes over the wheel. Every notification sound, Wikipedia link trips, Youtube autoplay circles, Medium, Quora, Facebook refreshes and many more feeds that monkey to hyper activity. But there’s a guardian still in their, we just need to wake it up a little more often. Deadlines are an effective way to wake up the panic monster to keep instant gratification monkey in check.
Hackathons
Hackathons are a good example of how we are able to create awesome things within that little span of time with complete focus and speed, as compared to not being able to complete what we thought as a tinier project over span of maybe 20 hackathons. The deadline and delivering your creation is what keeps you going and ultimately you make it just in time to start the circle of feedback and iterations.
The Parkinson’s law
There’s a pretty interesting law around the amount of work we have on any project known as Parkinson’s law. It basically says
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion
Without deadlines we let our work expand indefinitely, leading to either losing the interest in it over time or making it so complex that you don’t ship it. Shipping and iterating is a better approach as it keeps you in a constant feedback loop making you better at something faster as compared to just thinking over it. We should be leveraging these effects of deadlines in our day to day work be it a side project, reading a book, learning a new thing.
So what am I doing?
On these lines I’ll start posting my own deadlines for the things I will do on deadlines.devangb.com , and I hope you’ll be my panic monsters keeping my wheel away from the monkey. I’ll start with them today, or maybe not today.