Seeking Self: Procrastination

What causes you to procrastinate? How do you think you could avoid it?

I have had many theories about this in the past.

I have often believed that I need a certain level of pressure in order to get something done. If there's no impetus, nothing that's urgently requiring me to do something, then chances are excellent I won't do it. This, I reasoned, explained why I had such issues doing school work and writing uni assignments any earlier than a day or two before they were due. It wasn't necessarily that I wasn't working on them, because I still read textbooks, and looked at extra reading, went to tutorials and went to lectures, but the writing itself? No, that was something that didn't need to be done right now.

Of course, leaving things to the last minute caused no certain level of stress, but those rare times where I did try to get things done weeks earlier, when the assignment was given, I found that my brain just didn't work like it did in the last few days - When I knew it had to be done right now, or else, my brain seemed to suddenly focus. There was no such thing as writer's block, because if I was stuck somewhere, well, there was plenty of other places to start working on, and I had no choice but to write - If I didn't get it done, then I'd lose marks and that just would not do.

When I look back on that line of reasoning though, it seems very self serving - a clear attempt to justify the current patterns of behaviour. Even those times where it almost lead to ruin (a note to people: you can organise a masquerade ball in less than a week. If you have an organising genius on your side. Thus, I don't advise it), I'd still believe that this is just the way I work.

Knowing what I know of myself now, I think there is a certain level of truth to the above, but the issue is a somewhat broader one - I lack a lot of self-motivation, so I gain motivation from external sources, one of which happens to be deadlines. These days, I also gain motivation from my Daddy imposing schedules and requirements on me. My work keeps me motivated by having my work behaviour constantly monitored - I know that if I slack off on the job, people will notice.

What I really need to do is identify ways of building self-motivation, so that I'm motivated to do things because I want to do them, not because there's some external problem that's going to happen if I don't. Certainly, it would make things like organising events and appointments a whole lot easier if I could do them not at the last minute. I have experimented in the past with self-imposed deadlines and schedules, but the results never end up being terribly promising - since I know there's no penalty for failure, I fail with abandon.

For the moment, I rely pretty heavily on external motivation, to the point that I suspect Daddy may feel a little put upon by how much I seem to rely on him to regulate my behaviour and keep me on the straight and narrow. If I knew of a way of building internal motivation... well, okay, let's be honest. The only way I'm going to build self-motivation is if some external force shoves it into me. I don't think that's going to do in the long term.