Tell The Truth, and Call Out The Instant Gratification Monkey
The Rational Decision maker, the Instant Gratification Monkey and the Panic Monster are all the brain children of Tim Urban, introduced in his TED Talk on procrastination in 2016. Before you do anything else, you need to watch this TED Talk, which you can find here Tim Urban: Inside the mind of a master procrastinator | TED Talk
In a nutshell, the Rational Decision-Maker (RD) represents us as postgraduate students, steering the ship of our research. We have a timetable, and we know what needs to be done and by when. The Instant Gratification Monkey (IGM) is a creature who lives only in the present moment, and has two drivers, things that are “easy” and “fun”. In Urban’s TED talk, the IGM distracts the RD from the tasks in hand with trivia. The Panic Monster (PM) is the only thing that the IGM is afraid of, and when time is very short, the PM appears, frightens the IGM away, and the RD is left to pick up the pieces to deliver their work on time.
In the realms of the real world of part time postgraduate study the IGM is a master of disguise and replaces trivia with real-time issues. It will hi-jack you with what it represents as truths rather than trivia and do its Svengali-like best to convince you that you are allowing yourself to be side-tracked by the Greater Good. Our challenge is to call out the IGM, and to unpick whether or not the distraction is as important as it seems.
The hard part is that there will always be genuine emergencies where things are important and urgent and can only be done by you. Sometimes, the IGM really will be telling you the truth. In 2015, I was finalising the first draft of my literature review when I got a call to say that my dad has suffered a stroke, which would end his life 4 days later. As I ran out of the house to my car, I was shouting instructions to my husband to email it (in its incomplete state) to my supervisor with an apology, in order to meet my deadline). On this occasion, the IGM was right. It was a real emergency, it was important and urgent, I did need to go myself and I needed to go immediately.
The following year, the IGM persuaded me that it would be a good idea to make myself available to MA students for tutorials 3 evenings a week instead of 2; because it was in the best interests of my students to have a greater choice of timeslots. As it involved my day job and the needs of my students, I was comfortable in not challenging the IGM’s line of reasoning. It was also easier for me personally to tie up my time in the important and worthy aim of supporting my students than it was for me to address the challenge that had arisen in my research when I realised that my data didn’t fit my preferred theoretical framework.
The reason why the IGM is so dangerous is because it uses legitimate considerations such as meeting the needs of others, and to achieve a work-life balance to obfuscate your commitment to study and your time allocation. The IGM is insidious because it will encourage you to legitimise your procrastination. It will substitute Urban’s “easy” and “fun” for supporting the Greater Good or servicing the requirements of your day job. So, re-engage with your time allocation. Remind yourself of how you got to allocating your study slots in the first place. Whip out your version of your Eisenhower matrix and revisit the crocodiles closest to your canoe (if this makes no sense to you, refresh your memory by revisiting the Reach for the Stars blogpost). Tell the IGM that you have the measure of it and challenge it to provide you with evidence that the procrastination that it is proposing is really anything other than procrastination.
I can’t guarantee that this will ensure that the IGM exists screaming as it does in Urban’s TED-talk graphic, but I do find that if you keep asking it the “why” question (e.g. Why will it be better for the students to have a choice of three nights a week instead of 2? -and then ask the why question again), it will give up and slink off into the distance, leaving you to answer your own questions and make your own mind up about the Greater Good.
If you need an ear to talk this through, please get in touch through the website or the Educational Researchology Facebook page.
References
Urban, T. (2016). Tim Urban: Inside the mind of a master procrastinator | TED Talk. [Video file] Web. (Accessed 3rd November 2024)
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