美国国家公共电台 NPR What Happens In The Brain Of An Extreme Procrastinator?

What Happens In The Brain Of An Extreme Procrastinator 1?

GUY RAZ, HOST:

So for all of Adam Grant's research about procrastination 2 and slowing down, there is a right way to do it and a wrong way.

Can you introduce yourself please, Tim?

TIM URBAN: Yeah. I'm Tim Urban.

RAZ: Tim's a blogger. His blog is called...

URBAN: "Wait But Why."

RAZ: And Tim blogs on all kinds of topics.

URBAN: The cool thing about that is I can kind of switch it up based on whatever I'm interested in.

RAZ: And like any other job, being a blogger comes with job responsibilities. In fact, Tim has a list posted on his website.

URBAN: So my responsibilities are passionately 4 underestimating how long each post will take to do, pacing around in his underwear hating himself - that's one of my major responsibilities - thinking, if only I were doing that other topic, it would be so much easier.

RAZ: And you consider yourself to be a procrastinator, right?

URBAN: Yes, a chronic 5, troubled procrastinator, yes. It's my core struggle.

RAZ: The core struggle of your life.

URBAN: Yes.

RAZ: So naturally, Tim started to blog about procrastination.

URBAN: You know, I've now done three posts on procrastination, and I've gotten more emails regarding those three posts than the other 80 posts I've written combined.

RAZ: Now, one thing about these posts that seem to resonate with people is this visual Tim came up with to describe what goes on in his brain when he's procrastinating 6. He imagines these two cartoon characters fighting over control of his mental steering 7 wheel.

URBAN: You know, you picture inside your brain there's a wheel. Like, I always picture one of those wheels on the boats, you know, the big thing with the bunch of...

RAZ: The "Steamboat Willie" wheel, right?

URBAN: Yeah, yeah, those big octopus 8 wheels, yeah.

RAZ: Here's Tim on the TED 3 stage.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

URBAN: I wanted to explain to the non-procrastinators of the world what goes on in the heads of procrastinators and why we are the way we are. Now, I had a hypothesis that the brains of procrastinators were actually different than the brains of other people. Both brains have a rational decision-maker in them, but the procrastinators' brain also has an instant gratification monkey.

(LAUGHTER)

URBAN: Now, what does this mean for the procrastinator? Well, the instant gratification monkey does not seem like a guy you want behind the wheel. He lives entirely 9 in the present moment. He has no memory of the past, no knowledge of the future, and he only cares about two things - easy and fun.

(LAUGHTER)

URBAN: Now, we have another guy in our brain - the rational decision-maker who gives us the ability to do things no other animal can do. We can visualize 10 the future. We can see the big picture. We can make long-term plans. And he wants to take all of that into account, and he wants to just have us do whatever makes sense to be doing right now. Now, sometimes it makes sense to be doing things that are easy and fun, like when you're having dinner or going to bed or enjoying well-earned leisure time. Sometimes they agree, but other times, it makes much more sense to be doing things that are harder and less pleasant for the sake of the big picture, and that's when we have a conflict.

(LAUGHTER)

URBAN: So the rational decision-maker will make the rational decision to do something productive, but the monkey doesn't like that plan. So he actually takes the wheel and he says actually let's read the entire Wikipedia page of the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding scandal because I just remembered that that happened.

(LAUGHTER)

URBAN: Then...

(LAUGHTER)

URBAN: Then we're going to go over to the fridge and we're going to see if there's anything new in there since 10 minutes ago.

(LAUGHTER)

RAZ: So I bet that's a - I bet that's an interesting Wikipedia page about Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan.

URBAN: Oh, my God, it's so interesting.

RAZ: I bet it's amazing and lots of things to, like, hyperlink 11, click on.

URBAN: Oh, it's riveting 12.

RAZ: Yeah.

URBAN: Oh, God, so I read the whole thing. Then I went and read, you know, four other articles. Then I got into a whole Tonya Harding spiral. I read about her husband, who's an amazing character, by the way.

RAZ: Oh, man.

URBAN: Read about her husband, her husband's associate. This is the nightmare. So I'm doing this and the whole time the rational decision-maker's screaming at the top of his lungs...

RAZ: He's like, stop it.

URBAN: He's saying what the [expletive] are you doing? You have so much to do right now. This is - makes no sense and so - and so then me, I'm not actually having fun. I'm really, really upset while doing this. It's insane behavior, and it's this self-defeating kind of habitual 13 behavior. It's a habit to let the monkey kind of take over.

RAZ: Then how do you, like, ever get anything done as a procrastinator?

URBAN: There's another character called the panic monster.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME MUSIC)

URBAN: And the panic monster, you know, is dormant 14 almost all the time but emerges in a frenzy 15 when there is some external deadline because the only thing that scares the monkey, the only thing that can overpower the monkey is the panic monster.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

URBAN: And this entire situation with the three characters, this is the procrastinator's system. It's not pretty, but, in the end, it works. Well, turns out that there's two kinds of procrastination. When there's deadlines, the effects of procrastination are contained to the short term because the panic monster gets involved. But there's a second kind of procrastination that happens in situations when there is no deadline. So if you want to have a career where you want to be a self-starter, something in the arts, something entrepreneurial, there's no deadlines on those things at first.

There's also all kinds of important things outside of your career that don't involve any deadlines, like seeing your family or exercising and taking care of your health. Now, if the procrastinator's only mechanism 16 of doing these hard things is the panic monster, that's a problem because in all of these non-deadline situations, the panic monster doesn't show up. He hasn't nothing to wake up for, so the effects of procrastination are not contained. They just extend outward forever. The monkey's sneakiest trick is when the deadlines aren't there.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

RAZ: So Adam Grant was saying that this can actually, like, be a good thing, right? And so I wonder whether slowing things down, like, you know, procrastinating has actually helped you out.

URBAN: In a way, yeah. In a way, it is, like, the good part of procrastination for me in my particular line of work is the impulse to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's take a just deep breath here and let's take our time. I definitely go slowly as any reader of "Wait But Why" will tell you. I do not come out with posts very quickly. Sometimes if I take 10 weeks to come out with a blog post and it's 30,000 words, that's something, but it's not really what a blogger's supposed to do. And so, for me, going slow is an important part of what I do.

RAZ: Yeah. I mean, think about your - like, your blog has been pretty successful and the sort of the conventional wisdom about the internet is, you know, fast, brief, like, clickbait stuff, and you get lots of readers and you post, you know, whenever you can.

URBAN: Oh, yeah, I absolutely - for me - I mean, it wasn't a good business plan to try to out BuzzFeed BuzzFeed. You know, they write a thousand articles a day. I'm going to write 2,000 articles a day. That's obviously - I have no chance of doing that. And I definitely believe that the ability of "Wait But Why" to gain a readership is directly tied to, you know, me spending 60 or 80 hours on every single post. And they don't come out very often, but when they do, the quality is apparent. It's apparent that someone spent a long time on that.

RAZ: I mean, that's a thing. Like, I feel like, you know, the idea of slowing down, even when it takes the form of procrastination, like, has huge benefits.

URBAN: Absolutely. I think that for someone who wants to kind of really invent something that seems new or that seems, you know, that really seems fresh, that takes emotional and mental toil 17 over long periods of time. It doesn't just happen. But procrastination is different than slowing down. Procrastination often forces you to slow down, which is why it can be kind of an indirect asset.

So for me, all I cared about when I came out of college was doing creative - a creative pursuit of some kind, whether it was writing music or writing. And I didn't start doing, you know, one of those creative passions full time till I was 31. That procrastination set me back nine years there. So I think the answer isn't to be a procrastinator. That's someone who's not in control of their own life. The answer is to be in control and to know that it's smart to slow down and to do that in a controlled, intentional 18 way.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

RAZ: Tim Urban - his blog is called "Wait But Why." You can see his entire talk at ted.com. More ideas about slowing down in just a minute. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.