After reading the article ”Later” by James Surowiecki, I found it somewhat interesting and boring. I learned new things about procrastination. For example, James Surowicki is an economist and he procrastinated when he had to mail a box of clothes from India to America. This shows that everyone procrastinates, even smart people like James himself. James said ”Procrastination is not simply a matter of laziness or poor time management. It’s a complex behavior rooted in the interplay of various psychological factors, including irrational decision-making and the struggle between short-term desires and long-term goals.” I always thought that I am just lazy when I procrastinate, but it is not, it has to do with psychological factors and the human brain. Procrastination in Greek is called ”akrasia”, which means ”doing something against one’s own better judgment”. Many people get easily distracted and do things that are going against their better judgment. For example, I was assigned to read this article, but I was procrastinating while doing so, scrolling on my phone and playing music distracting myself from reading the article. The right thing to do is find a quiet area to read and annotate the article, but I am going against my own better judgment. The statement ”It’s a complex behavior rooted in the interplay of various psychological factors, including irrational decision-making and the struggle between short-term desires and long-term goals.” It really stuck to me because my short term desire right now is to finish up this Youtube video, but my long term goal is to do well in the class and pass it, so I can agree that people make irrational decisions. I lost interest when he brought up the historical background of procrastination. I like articles that are straight forward and straight to the meat, but he brought some past details about procrastination that were not really interesting to me. He also used many difficult words that I never heard of before like, ”hyperbolic discounting” and ”planning fallacy” so it was hard for me to understand and I had to google these terms.
