Late morning on Saturday, I was awakened by the noise as my housemates prepared food for their late breakfast. I reached my phone, opened my Facebook and quickly scanned the news feed. I was still lying in my bed while trying to entertain myself with some funny videos in Facebook. Plagued with boredom, I tried to entertain myself some more with the funny videos I'm watching not realizing that it is already midday. I just can't seem to get rid of my phone no matter how much willpower I muster and remind myself that I still have a lot of things to do for the day.
I am pretty sure that some of you, if not all, can relate to this struggle. Procrastination and indulging ourselves on pleasant but unimportant things are almost second nature to us. Do you agree? Well, I can say that it takes discipline and commitment to keep ourselves moving throughout the day. There are myriad of reasons why procrastination seems to take over our lives.
One reason is nature. As I've said earlier, we tend to indulge ourselves on pleasant things which soothe our feelings and abstain on unpleasant things that usually involve effort and pain. As John Maxwell said in his book titled Failing Forward, "People naturally tend towards inertia. That's why self-improvement is such a struggle." Maybe God intended us to be like this so that we can consider effort and sacrifice as the sole means of achieving our goals, which in turn can make us become more self-reliant and confident as we go through the different kinds of challenges in our lives.
Another reason I can think of is distraction. We can probably spend much of our discussion on this matter since distraction, like an epidemic, is affecting lots of people nowadays especially the newer generations. While it is true that technology improved our lives in ways unimaginable, it also affected our relationships with ourselves, with others and with our work. We became obsessive data hoarders and voracious data consumers. Everywhere we go, there are always distractions. Most workers and professionals today use computers to do their job. And these computers are excellent tools for multi-tasking and are very good in giving workers a lot of to dos which are irrelevant to their work.
