Slack Later
Laze around, but not now...
The mind is sometimes so overwhelmingly smart that you have to trick it to discipline it. God has given us such a wonderful tool for thinking that we often waste it for purpose no more than entertainment and pleasure-seeking. Laziness combined with the love for pleasure easily combines to impair the foresight of our minds. And this is really why we skip lectures to play foosball in the student cafe or hang out with friends at Timbre till pretty late even when we know that there's a important test coming up the next day at the first period.
The attitude-correcting technique I'm introducing today, known as 'Slack Later' is an important skill that will carry you far in life because postponing a moments gratification could easy save your life or determine your success for the next decade, it guides you in decision-making big or small; choosing between having a sandwich at 10am and a plate of economic mixed rice at 1pm or making your university choices.
Now to discipline your mind to 'slack later', you have to come up with reasons why you will end up on the losing end when you make the choice to slack now, or to satisfy yourself at the moment. Here's an example I always use to force myself to attend lectures:
Sometimes I find attending lectures stupid because I can easily read lecture notes at home myself and understand most stuff. It's only a couple of harder concepts that I've to clarify with tutors later. However, if I choose not to attend lecture for an entire day, it means I have to waste my precious time at home reading lecture notes for 3 lectures (assuming there's 3 in that day) instead of playing Red Alert 2 with a friend. Wait a minute, I need to watch Spongebob Squarepants at 5pm and I might not even have much time left for playing computer games after reading those notes so I might as well attend the lecture and read them on the spot - at least I get the blanks filled on the spot and I can clarify anything I'm unsure about on the spot with the smart friends rather than disturb them later when I get home.
'Slack Later' essentially extends your foresight. Often we are only concerned with what happens immediately and this sets the basis for procrastination, as if there is infinite time in the future for us to expend. Thinking about how the consequences of your action now would affect your pleasurable experiences later would force you to reconsider your decisions. Often in our mind, decisions can be categorized into the ones that you hope you could make and the decisions you would want to make. They are different because the decision you hope you could make is often the difficult way out that will help relieve your woes later but the decision you would like to make often postpones problems to later (sometimes couple of years down the road).
Big, important decisions would show this phenomenon very clearly. For example, when you consider between US and Singapore universities, you realized that US college applications take too much hassle and so even if you might enjoy a US college education experience better, that's something that happens later and thus less important. You probably hoped that you would apply to US but then the hassle presents an inertia that you didn't manage to overcome and eventually you end up in a Singapore university education experience. I'm in no way making generalizations about education experiences but trying to present how a simple decision resulting from the desire to make your life easier now can have a negative long term impact on later life.
'Slack Later' technique gives you the motivation to make 'smarter choices' for yourself and make decision based on consideration for a longer time frame than just attempting to achieve immediate gratification. Start practicing it now! Good Luck!
