I procrastinated so long to write this article, that I almost didn’t write it. I wanted to find the perfect topic, the perfect style, and the perfect time to sit down and produce a piece of writing worthy of being published. Instead, I’m typing it at 1:25 am on a Saturday, needless to say, well past the deadline. I haven’t settled on a main thread yet, but perhaps by the time I get to 4000 characters an engaging commentary will materialise.
Procrastination is portrayed as an illness that we need to cure. Chances are you’ve looked it up too; ”how do I stop procrastinating?”. And a bunch of winning strategies popped up, like ”eat the frog”, ”just do it”, ”start small” etc. You’re still procrastinating, aren’t you? I bet you have at least three things parked in your brain in a box labelled ”I’ll do it later” at this very moment. In fact, why don’t we just go and rename our to-do list as ”procrastination list”? After all, the first step to self-confidence is making it easier to trust ourselves.
Am I the one with the problem, though? Do I need to cure my procrastination, or does the world need to give me more time to do things, and less things to do overall? When I try to open ten different things on my laptop at the same time, it makes me wait. Then it’s up to me. If I’m in a patience-friendly mood, after some time it delivers. If not, I’ll sink even deeper into the no-patience zone and make the whole thing crash by frenetically trying to speed up the process. Then I may or may not conclude that I need a new laptop with a more powerful processor. Do I really? Frankly, on a personal level it remains a hypothetical question, because I still can’t print money. But on a large scale the spiral goes on and we just want more and more.
Maybe computers can grow infinitely in terms of power. How about the human brain’s capacity? Have you unlocked the full potential of your brain yet? According to the first information I got from a quick googling, our brain has 2.5 petabytes, also known as 2.5 million gigabytes of storage. Still, even when (or if ever) it reaches this limit, it doesn’t just run out of space, we can have an infinite amount of information stored in it. There was a citation from Scientific American, so we should be good. But this isn’t the real question, is it? Another compelling but kind of unrelated question is: does the human brain eat itself from lack of sleep? It’s one of the most popular google searches on our brain. I don’t think you want to know the answer. The real enigma is: can we multitask? The short answer is no. The long answer too. When we think we’re multitasking, we’re simply quickly switching from one task to the other. Computers do the same, it’s called timesharing (they do it much faster, of course).
How did we get to multitasking? Simple, when you have a lot of things to do with a short deadline, you procrastinate until you really cannot see any better way to complete the tasks on time other than by invoking the divine power of multitasking. Too bad it doesn’t exist. Panic. Anxiety. Fear. Aaand crash.
I’m not going to give you a solution to the issue. But Einstein supposedly said that the formulation of a problem is often more essential than the solution. So I’ve done the hard part for you. The truth is, we all know what the solution would be, but we also know we’re probably never going to get there. The solution would be lowering the demand for productivity. We’re in Bocconi, hope you appreciate the irony. There’s a reason everyone wants to go and live on a deserted island today. The lack of wi-fi is a big turn-off, but we’ll manage.
This is the point where my brain has eaten enough of itself to not be able to come up with any new thoughts. So the article is complete, as far as I’m concerned. And before you start counting, no, it doesn’t reach 4000 characters. But is it more than zero? Definitely. In the end, the biggest thing comforting me is that independent of whether this article is perfect or imperfect, it’s definitely in the right issue. Cheers.
I’m a third-year BAI student from Budapest. Being Italo-Hungarian I always found it challenging to define where I belong, in all the places I’ve been to I found a piece of home. Travelling and learning languages are my favourite hobbies, beside reading and writing. I have a deep passion for science and research.
