Jolie Huang, Period 2, 10/19/20, Day A

Jolie Huang
Modern Mythology
10/19/20
Period 2


At this current point in time, what specific goal(s) do you have for yourself? Why?

Just like every other senior in the school, my goal is also to get through such a different college process than what we all know of! With this goal of getting through my college applications though, I think my main goal is to stop being a procrastinator. Embarrassingly, procrastination has been something I’ve been dealing with the 5th grade; It all started when I pulled my first all-nighter because I had to read 10 chapters of “My Brother Sam Is Dead” at once. I think the main thing that’s keeping me from fixing my procrastination is my mindset of being able to pull things off last minute. It happens with my tests and projects where I do it last minute and everything turns out fine for me… but what about my college apps? Surely, it won’t be the same: how could I do something in a week whereas some people do them over months? My problem has gotten to a point where it’s almost the end of October and I haven’t started my common app essay or my art portfolio yet. Every time I tell myself to do something, the little voice in the back of my head always tells me, “What you’re doing right now is so much more fun and relaxing!” Then, 5 hours pass. Then, I get frustrated with myself because I know I wouldn’t be feeling like this if I had just done what I had to do earlier. Then, I tell myself, “It’s ok, I shouldn’t worry about this too much because I’ll pull this off in the end.” Repeat. It’s an endlessly toxic cycle that I’ve constantly looped around. My main goal is to break this cycle and the most effective way to solve this is to stay focused on my end goal and take things day by day.

How do you demonstrate resilience towards achieving this goal? (or these goals?)

One thing that’s been helping me out is making a to-do list of all of my tasks. Since middle school, I’ve been in the habit of having a planner of some sort to keep my assignments and deadlines noted at all times. Organization is definitely a key part in trying to curb procrastination because there’s more structure in your routine that you’d want to stick to. Something I learned recently is that procrastination is the result of you wanting to avoid the negative feelings of anxiety and discomfort that come with approaching a daunting task. So to overcome this, you need to figure out the reason why you need to finish said task, what bigger goal you would achieve after finishing, and (most importantly) what would happen if you just didn’t do the task at all. Writing down these reasons next to the bullets on my to-do list have been really helping me out. If I see something along the lines of “Jolie, you’re going to fail the SAT if you don’t put in the effort of finishing a chapter of the workbook”, then I’ll have the motivation to get started. Lastly, I’ve been into keeping motivational statements in my mind a lot to keep myself focused and not get bogged down by feelings of negativity. They could be things like “doing a little is better than doing nothing” or “if you do it now, you won’t have to do it later”. I think this goes hand in hand with my belief that structure keeps you from straying away from your goal. If I have a mindset of taking things one step at a time instead of multiple steps all at once, I’ll become less stressed/overwhelmed and finish my tasks efficiently.

How does the world around you affect your perception of this goal? (or these goals?)

The pandemic has given me an invaluable opportunity, which is more time and less schoolwork. It’s unfortunate that our progress in the school year has been going slower than normal, but I could flip this around and see it as something positive. Ending school everyday at either 11AM or 2PM both give me hours in the afternoon to get things done. I could only see this as a chance given by the universe to finally solve my procrastination problem. Another way the world affected my perception of this goal is that everyone is also taking advantage of having more free time because of the pandemic. If everyone else is also doing it, then it’s a sign for me to also act upon myself and improve my work ethic. We don’t know what other time we’ll be able to experience something like this (hopefully never again), but if we see it as something positive, then something equally as positive will come out of it.