Dangerous Distractions

Bad habits are hard to break. We all know this from experience because everyone has one or two bad habits that bite them in the rear. They take away valuable time and they are harmful to your overall health and success in life. My bad habit is no different.

My worst bad habit is my tendency to get distracted when I hit a rut in a project. I’d be writing some paper and get writer’s block, so what do I do? I’d start surfing the web for videos to watch or bits of news to read. I’d get so caught up in these things that I’d spend all day on them. For those who read my previous posts on college, this bad habit is squarely to blame for my almost failing college.

See, whenever I reach a block, I know that I’m supposed to try and find a way around it. I’m supposed to think smarter, not harder. But I often don’t do so. I instead just give up without admitting to myself that I am giving up. I tell myself “I am going to take a break, then get back to the task later.” Surely, after I’ve taken some time away from this problem, I can go back to the problem later, right? But it never happens that way. Instead, I wind up getting sucked into some activity and forget what I’m supposed to do up until the last minute. The project then gets rushed (if I even am able to do it at all) and I make a bad grade. Rinse and repeat.

I think the problem lies in the idea that regular breaks are a good thing. No, I’ve learned, concentrating on a single task for a long time yields the best results, at least for me. Procrastination is the end result of taking regular breaks because getting off-task breaks my line of thought. I can’t come back to what was being written before anymore.

Similar to my procrastination habit is my habit of constantly clicking on other things. This one always makes my mom furious. “Brent, stop clicking!” I’ve often given her a hard time for harping on about it. I mean, it seems so minor. But honestly? It’s an automatic reaction at this point. Sometimes, I do it when I don’t realize what I’m doing.

There’s a sort of Reverse-Zen that one can reach if they spend enough time doing the Wiki Walk. For those not in the know, the Wiki Walk is when you go onto a massive website (usually Wikipedia or some social media account) and start just clicking on anything that interests you so that you can read it. You can spend hours upon hours doing this. Eventually, you reach a place where your rational mind is subsumed by the process of automated clicking and reading. If the Singularity occurs, then this is how it will happen. People won’t need to be forced into a Matrix: they’ll go in willingly.

But where was I? Oh yes, my bad habits. These bad habits have interfered with my writing many times as well. For the longest time, I was resistant to writing things for exactly this reason. Only by just writing it all down in length can you actually write. If you spend too much time planning and researching, you’ll get analysis paralysis; you’ll be stuck at that researching phase indefinitely, unable to think up what to write. But you can’t write if you can’t concentrate on writing!

It was this lesson that I learned during my final year of college, when my Mom put her foot down and had me focus on writing. She made her expectations very clear and gave me no wiggle room. Even when she wasn’t in the room, I always felt her over my shoulder, watching me, making sure that I wouldn’t lose track of time. And it was through this that I was able to make top marks on my projects.

But the point of this story isn’t that your mom has to keep you on track. It’s that you have to keep on track, whether or not your mother is there watching over your shoulder. Otherwise, you’ll end up on the same path to failure as I once was. So take that lesson to heart: make sure not to procrastinate!