Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Ticking one box every week

I watched a ted talk recently regarding procrastination. We all do it in various degrees all the time. There are two kinds of situation where procrastination can be seen as a boon or a bane. The first kind is when there is a deadline, and when it's drawing nearer and nearer, the panic monster in us suddenly awakens and make us do the necessary things to get things done. Then there's another kind where there's no obvious dateline. This is where the panic monster do not appear.


A good example is like exercising or eating a healthy diet. There's no dateline for such things, and so we tend to procrastinate the good but painful life choices until well, it's too late. The speaker suggested we look at the picture that I've done up below.




Each box is a week of our life. There are 4,680 such boxes in it, enough to tick one box every week from birth till we're 90 years old. Some of the boxes are shaded and some are not yet. I'm sure you know why some boxes are shaded and why some are not.


Life itself is a deadline, and you can say it's the biggest deadline here. Live life fully and don't regret not doing the things you want to do. Create meaning in your life.


And start right now because we don't really know how many boxes we have left.

11 comments :

Createwealth8888 said...

Very true!

la papillion said...

Hi bro8888,

:)

aloypo said...

Hi LP!

I watched the same Ted talk as well! Indeed, I think when we start ticking off one box at a time in our lives, we'll be able to see how limited our time really is and that might really start getting us doing what really matters in our life rather than think that we have a lot of time and not get started at all, pushing it all to a later date.

mini G said...

This is a good way to visualize such information.

I've made my own boxes and printed it out and now I've set my homepage to remind me of my week number! (to keep my sheet updated)

It gives a sense of urgency seeing how the boxes are finite, but also a sense of achievement knowing how much you've already done in those ticked boxes!

Thanks for the inspiration!

Patrick T. said...

You need to read his book.

http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

la papillion said...

Hi aloypo,

Haha, so you know which ted talk I'm talking about :)

la papillion said...

Hi GMGH,

Wow, you need to blog about this man, spread it out! Nah, don't thank me, thank the ted talk guy!

la papillion said...

Hi Patty,

Okay! I'll go and find out about it :) Thanks for the recommendation :)

Lizardo said...

That feels pretty stressful! *roll eyes*

la papillion said...

Hi Lizardo,

Haha, not asking you to tick a box everyday :) I think the fact that you find it stressful means perhaps there are some things you need to do but you haven't been doing? lol

la papillion said...

Hi temperament,

I agree with you on that - laze around doing nothing can be an art :) We can't all be scrambling to do things every single min. Like the stock market, we need time to consolidate too!

Wah, all things are in vain in the end...sad but true.