We all are procrastinating on something. In his TED speech, writer and blogger Tim Urban supposed that there is a difference between the brain of a procrastinator and non-procrastinator. Of course, he was tongue-in-cheek, but he told that there livelives 3 characters in the procrastinator’s mind. The first character is the rational decision-maker. He is a person who’swhose main work is to set long-term goals, think about the future and to make us do things that make sense.

But in the procrastinator’s brain, this rational decision-maker is constantly interrupted by the Instant Gratification Monkey. I suppose she is a part of our ancient, primitive, animal brain, and the real, scientific name of this monkey is dopamine. Dopamine promises us immediate pleasure, and in ancient times it motivated us to look for food and shelter, to propagate. This dopamine monkey doesn’t care about the future, and it doesn’t know about the past, the. The only two things it cares about are “easy” and “fun”. Hence, instead of working or studying or doing other things that make sense, we chose some easy and funny pleasures like Internet surfing or watching stupid videos on youtubeYoutube. Tim Urban calls this the Dark Playground. And we can spend on this playground the whole day or even the whole week or more. But actually staying there we don’t feel joy — we experience guilt and anxiety and other bad procrastinator’s feelings.

There is a third character in this procrastinator’s system. His name is a panic monster. He dozes most of the time. butBut he wakes up when the deadline is close, and there is a threat of fail or dismissal or public embarrassment. He is the only creature the Monkey is terrified of. So when the panic monster shows up, the monkey hides, and we finally start working.