Overcoming Procrastination

I was happy to finally start be able to refuse to make myself miserable about anything. Recently I managed to control my emotion and dispute my tyranny of musts and shoulds. This helps me to have a happy live. However, I often take it to the extreme by the easy going approach in terms of taking commitment and staying true to the current commitments.

In another word, it is very easy for me to get distracted or to take new commitments while the current ones are left neglected. This literally happened yesterday. I got to know about the deadline of the ACM Special Interest Group in Simulation conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Event Simulation three weeks ago. But I just started to think about it last week. Only on Wednesday night I really spent time for drafting the paper. I woke up on Thursday morning so that I could start work early. But end up I didn’t have the energy on Thursday night. On Friday at the end I didn’t do anything as I was busy with my ideas in the office and then followed by attending prayer’s meeting and watching the election debate. So I only had yesterday morning of which I wasted time to mention about my theories and experiences to my wife. It was only by God’s grace that I woke up at around 4.30 and spend 30 minutes to write about the idea. But afterwards, I wasted the grace by taking my own sweet time having breakfast and chit-chatting. I was only ready by 10.30 am. So at the end, I had to break my lunch date with my wife as I was nowhere to finish at 12 pm and only managed to submit by 3 pm.

In short, my procrastination has caused my wife and possibly my colleagues suffer. I had the capabilities but I didn’t put efforts to deliver. No planning was involved and I only relied on God’s grace, which seems to be more of testing God as last minute tendency means I demand God to follow or to give what I want immediately.

So it is time to change. It is time to take this problem seriously. It is time to find tools to overcome procrastination. Today I also make a promise to my wife to spend 30 minutes every day for doing reading or research as a part to break down things as I still have another two conference papers to go: Winter Simulation Conference of which deadline is on 7 April and IEEE Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management of which deadline is on 1 June. For each of the paper, I promised my wife to spend at least 20 hours instead of the 5 hours I did yesterday.