Is it still wasting time if you enjoy it?

Not wasting time is a matter of correctly identifying what you truly want to do with your time, then doing that. What you end up doing and it's benefit relative to some other person's standard is irrelevant.

Two basic traits of being an adult are responsibility and independence.

Responsibility to others is the easy one, because the idea of letting someone else down and having to face real consequences acts as a weapon against procrastination. If someone expects you to get something done by a certain time, then the closer that deadline gets the more likely a person is to break free of procrastination.

However, when the responsibility is to ourselves, that deadline never comes. Something that we decide to do on our own has no external consequences for failure. It makes us feel bad to let ourselves down, of course, but this is unfortunately an easy thing to get used to and just begin to accept as routine.

Responsibilities are created out of a commitment to expectation, and no one expects more from us than ourselves. A person cannot call themselves responsible when they consistently let down the person who they are closest to and rely on the most.

Procrastination shares a similar relationship with independence as with responsibility. How does someone who procrastinates eventually get things done? As mentioned, deadlines are a strong anti-procrastination force. Another is simply being scolded or denied something as punishment. A simple example is a parent having to scold their child to complete their homework because the child always leave it until too late at night. The parent may even take the child's allowance for ransom if the problem persists.

The common thing among anti-procrastination forces is that they are external. This creates a dependence. A person who procrastinates is a person who cannot accomplish tasks on their own and relies on external forces such as deadlines or nagging parents/teachers/bosses to get anything done. This is a clear lack of a very important kind of independence, one that allows us to do what we truly want to do with our time.

For example, a person who truly desires to, say, learn a new language. They have reason to do so, a real practical use for the language. They are aware of the benefits, and know of several ways to get started. There are online resources, libraries with endless books, or even paid classes to attend.

Now to make this relevant to this blog.

The issue is that this example person, even though they have a genuine desire to spend their time studying the language, they do not enjoy doing it. They know they will enjoy having done it, and that it will become more enjoyable as they learn more and more, but they instead procrastinate. The solution here is simple: grow the f%@# up and stop acting like a dependent child. Be your own parent, and stop letting yourself down just because it's the easier thing to do. Look in the mirror and compare how old you look to how old you act.

As harsh as it seems, I firmly believe that anyone who procrastinates cannot call themselves a matured adult. A major part of growing up is becoming able to do things that we may not enjoy doing, but we will enjoy having done. This is the key to not wasting time, regardless of what that may mean for the individual.

If a person genuinely wants to spend five hours a day playing Starcraft, then not doing that would be wasting time. If they instead do out to try and meet people and get laid but despise every second of it and don't even really care about the sex, then that's a waste of time.

So here's the key concept: if a person genuinely had a better use of those five hours, then they would not genuinely want to spend five hours playing Starcraft. This is the natural fail-safe of acting like an adult. A true adult can't help but

For example, if they have an exam coming up and they know they should lower their Starcraft time down to one hour, then that becomes their new genuine desire. If they actually act on this, and do what they truly want, which is four hours of study then 1 hour of Starcraft, then they can honestly call themselves an adult. If they instead habitually just play Starcraft while consciously thinking about how they would rather be studying, then they're just an over-sized child and need to grow the f$#@ up pronto and stop wasting their life doing things they'll just feel bad about later, whatever those things may be.

Here's a tip. When you wake up and you're lying in bed, take a moment and pretend that it's actually night and you're going to bed. What are you glad you got done that day? What are you glad you didn't do? The answers to those questions reveal the things that you really want to do, or not do. Do anything else and you fail at adulthood.