I did it my way

It’s Second Semester Orientation at Adelaide University right now, and last week I helped out at a session called Starting Strong for new students. One part of that session got the students to discuss procrastination, and I told the students that one thing that causes procrastination for me is being told to do a task via a process that doesn’t work for me. I spend days and sometimes months trying to bring myself to do it their way and only when I say, “Stuff it I’m doing it my way,” does the task actually get done.

For example, when I wrote the Maths Foundations course, the project managers wanted me to tell them from the outset what the topic titles were and not to worry about the more finely-grained ideas and individual pages until later. And I agonised for ages trying to figure it out. But then I realised that until I decided what the ideas and pages were, I wouldn’t know how to organise them into topics or to give titles to those topics. So in the end that’s what I did. I brainstormed everything and then organised it. And it worked out better because then I had done the second part of what they wanted too.

For another example, people sometimes give me pre-prepared slides for presentations with pre-prepared sections and I struggle for a long time to try to think about my presentation in terms of the section titles they give. Not until I completely ignore the slides and attempt to speak out the talk without slides do I have a chance of making slides. Or indeed making the decision of whether I want slides at all.

On that same theme, I remember in high school my teachers made a huge deal of making note cards for presentations and even asked us to hand them in, and it actually prevented me from preparing effectively at all. I find cards very difficult to use because I can’t see what’s coming in the presentation and how it’s related to what came before. Knowing I had to make cards stressed me out and stopped me from planning the talk because I was worried about them. (Now I write notes on an A4 sheet of paper and refer to the sheet during the presentation, because I can see the whole presentation at once and can tell spatially where I am up to.)

Another example: Many resources about problem-solving or assignment planning include advice to formulate a plan or break a problem into smaller steps. I have seen many students paralysed by this advice, because they can’t see a path all the way to the end and so can’t break the path into smaller steps. Because they can’t see how to do the entire thing, they do nothing at all. Much more productive advice is to find any smaller part and do that, and then decide what to do again after you’ve done that. (Yes I know there are many problems that really do have to be planned out from the start, but there are many many that don’t and even if you find yours does have to be planned out that way, just doing anything will usually help you realise more planning is needed.)

I’m sure there are lots more examples. There are two things from opposite perspectives that I hope people take away from this:

1. If you find yourself avoiding a task, consider whether one reason you’re avoiding it is because you were told to approach it in a certain way, and consider approaching it in a different way.
2. If you give tasks to people, try your hardest not to enforce a specific order to do it or a specific way to organise things, even if you think it’s helpful to do so. It may be the opposite of helpful.