What I have learned from being both workaholic and procrastinator?

Have you ever met a person who is a strong advocate of procrastination? Procrastination, or the act of delaying or postponing something, conventionally speaking, is often painted as something bad which just leads to chaos.
Similarly, towards the other end of spectrum lies a person called workaholic. You can easily identify a person to be workaholic if he or she satisfies one or more of the following conditions.

• He thinks of how he can free up more time to work.
• He spends much more time working than initially intended.
• He works in order to reduce feelings of guilt, anxiety, helplessness and/or depression.
• He has been told by others to cut down on work without listening to them.

People either classify someone to be a procrastinator, or a workaholic and I always found myself to be both. It is as awkwardly funny as it is absolutely true. You will meet some of the people I know who would always say they have never seen me working and instead have seen me partying all the time, and the other half will testify otherwise. Both are not wrong in their own prospective, but i have a simple theory to justify myself.

I like to multitask, love procrastinating and always set goals but also like to chill. My To-Do list always have a minimum of 20 tasks per day each with the deadline approaching. One of the best favour one can do to his own self is to actually spend time to understand how your mind works. I can tell you with absolute certainty, that no one else can tell you with surety on how can you make more of your time, as they will be sharing their experience of what actually worked for them without considering your working style. This is one of the reason research is still done to understand time management and productivity.

For me, every task i am doing is at the 11th hour, on the last day of the deadline which makes me hyperactive for that task and increases my productivity. At the same day, I will be setting my goals for next week or month and will procrastinate until the deadline approaches and I will do that with unequivocal enthusiasm nullifying the negative effects of procrastination as my time table will always be full.

My bachelor’s thesis was written in 3 days, as i was procrastinating the whole time. But that time was not idle as that time which can be considered as procrastination time for thesis writing, I was on a deadline to complete some other task.

If you can program your procrastinating mind to set goals and you have an element of persistence and goal achievement, nothing will beat you. At the end of the day, you will be working 15 hours a day with an average of 40 hours a week more than an average person making a total of 150 hours a month. In a longer run, you will be working 1800 hours more in a year which should definitely put you at competitive advantage than people of your age.

On the downside, you feel immense responsibility, and it sometimes get toxic at the cost of your mental health affecting your relationships. Since you are busy meeting your deadlines everyday, there is less time left to spend on people that should actually matter and you always struggle in maintaining good relations when social point of view is taken into consideration. This is one of the reason, massively successful people always lead the world at the cost of their personal relationship. At the end of the day, it is you who has to decide how you wish things to go, whats more important to you and make a conscious, emotionally intelligent decision to be more aware of your actions and the subsequent reactions. I hope this way you will be better able to decide what you have to do with the time you have.

Here is an interesting video of Tim Urban where he talks about the mind of master procrastinator giving his personal experience which I personally found interesting, so if you have time, do have a look.