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Real English Conversations: Perfectionism and procrastination 3

Lori — Thu, 06 May 2010 20:54:08 +0000

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Introduction
Hi! Lori here, welcoming you to another episode of Real English Conversations from BetterAtEnglish.com. In today’s conversation, my friend Yvette returns to help me finish our earlier conversation about perfectionism and procrastination. This time we focus on the strategies that we’ve found helpful in our own battles with this debilitating problem. As always, you can find the vocabulary notes and full transcript of this podcast on our website, www.BetterAtEnglish.com.

OK, here we go!

Conversation Transcript

Lori: Actually, there was one thing that I think in our last conversation about perfectionism and procrastination that we didn’t really cover…
Yvette: OK
Lori: …and that’s what you do to get out of the procrastination habit once you’ve identified that you have a problem with it. Like if you have any methods that you’ve used to help you over the fear of starting or working on whatever it is you’re supposed to be working on.
Yvette: [Laughs] You’re asking me?
Lori: Yeah, yeah we didn’t talk about that.
Yvette: How you actually get out of it? Wow…
Lori: If there’s anything you do…
Yvette: If you find out, let me know. I mean, that’s kind of tricky. Wow, that’s something to think about. Well, usually I start with a plan. You break it down and smaller bits…so… the way that I can do it sometimes is to just say, “There is…I need to do a task and let me just first open the file folder.” That’s my first step. Once I’ve got that opened up and I’ve got the file maybe even opened in my browser — whatever I needed to be in — then I can start working on it. But it really is just kicking my butt…giving myself a good kick and going, “Come on, you can do it today.” But I tend to just find 15 other things to do first, which is clear my desk…oh yeah, I need lunch…oh, I need to do to the — let me do the groceries right now instead of later, so I don’t get interrupted by that. Um, so I tried to get rid of things, but I don’t know, I try to plan it better, but that usually doesn’t work — for me anyway.
Lori: Uh huh. Well, it sounds to me, when you mention that, for example, if it’s a writing project, that you start by just opening the file….
Yvette: Yeah.
Lori: …to me that sounds like you’re breaking it down to something you know you can do that really doesn’t require any performance. I mean it’s not difficult to just open the file and look at it, but then at least you make that first step.
Yvette: Yeah, it’s…I do find though, that is the hardest step, that very first one. Once I’ve got that one, it pretty much moves on from there. Once I’ve got the file and I know what I’m looking at — and maybe part of that is that it’s a bit chaotic, especially as a writer I may have 15 drafts of a similar text, and I’m not even sure what the first one or the last one was that I used and which one I was in, and I try to make notes of this in a notebook that I keep specifically for that purpose, umm, but to know what part, what I should be working on, just that, identifying that helps. And then I can open that file in my word processor and start working, umm, and then it’s okay. And then it’s just a matter of not getting interrupted by anything or anybody.
Lori: Yeah, that’s really hard.
Yvette: Because once that interruption comes, then it’s very hard to go back to it.
Lori: Yeah, it takes you a while to get back into the flow once you’ve been interrupted.
Yvette: But it’s also kind of overcoming a sort of fear of not being able to do it. Umm, you know, when you want to start a task and you think, “Ah, I don’t know, it’s a big task; I’m not sure I can do it.” You know, to just get started and throw out the idea that it needs to be perfect, and that you know, any effort right now would be good. But by that time though, I’ve already procrastinated to a point of it almost not being possible anymore, or at least being way too late. You know what I mean? It’s like you’ve already kind of passed five deadlines at this point.
Lori: Yeah, mmm. I guess were coming round again to that idea that just getting started is often the hardest part, and by that I don’t mean like actually “started at the beginning of a project,” but maybe even when you’re working on it, like, getting started with your work period for the day, or whatever, that’s really hard.
Yvette: Yeah.
Lori: And I found, for me, there was actually a site on the Internet that had what they called a “procrastination hack“…
Yvette: Okay!
Lori: ..that I’ve actually used it from time to time, and, it, I find that it’s been quite helpful in just getting me…when it…especially for jobs that are just a matter of like, sitting your butt in the chair for a certain amount of time and just focusing on it, you know, to get it done…umm, and what they call it is the Procrastination (10+2)x5 hack.
Yvette: Okay…

Timer Lori uses for the procrastination hack

Lori: And basically what it is is you need to use a little timer, and you set your timer for 10 minutes, and the idea is that you’re going to sit down and you’re going to single-mindedly focus on your task and work on it for 10 minutes, and after that you get to take a two-minute break and just screw around and do what you want for two minutes. And after that you’ve got another 10-minute work period, and then followed by a two-minute break. And if you do that five times you’ve basically spent an hour, of which 50 minutes you’ve been productively working on your task. And it sounds, like, really kind of cheesy and stupid but when you’re, like, so desperate, and like, can’t find any way to get started and you know that “Well, if I just do that first 10 minutes, then I can spend two minutes dorking around and doing whatever I want,” it just kind of makes it more concrete…that you have the specific work period…
Yvette: I see..
Lori: And it’s not too long, I mean, 10 minutes is only 10 minutes. And I’ve found — I don’t actually use it anymore — but I have used it in the past, and I found that it was actually, kind of a way to make the task seem less daunting. You know, you’re putting a limit on it, and you’re giving yourself a chance to screw around, and…umm, yeah, I found it really useful.
Yvette: I see. I would find 15 ways around that.
[Laughter]
Lori: Really?
Yvette: I would probably spend most of the time figuring out how I could make that work in a different way!
Lori: Uh huh!
Yvette: Now, what I do do, especially when I’m writing and I know…I mean, it’s to tell myself I need to write for four hours today.
Lori: Umm hmm.
Yvette: And then I have a stopwatch, and every time I stop writing I just hit the stopwatch. And I go, “Well, that’s it…you’re not working right now.” And umm, at the end of the day I just have to have four hours’ worth of work, and I don’t care how I get there, but I just do it that way. And the advantage of it is that…I discovered, that, the amazing amount of work you can do in four hours. You know, you’re not thinking about, it. It’s so much work, and, yet you don’t feel like you’ve worked all that much ’cause it’s only four hours in a day, big deal. But, that helps.
Lori: Yeah, to me that sounds like a similar idea, except that you’ve…you’re a lot more flexible in the time… that you’ve set the limit to four hours, and…
Yvette: ‘Cause I would hate to get interrupted by anything. You know, if I got 10 minutes of writing done I’m in it, and now I don’t want to stop writing, I just want to keep going.
Lori: Yeah, well that’s kind of the idea, is that, you know, once you then get in the flow you wouldn’t need to do it.
Yvette: Okay, that’s the idea.
Lori: It’s really more for when you’ve got this huge resistance to just even getting started and even…are completely blocked and just can’t get going at all ’cause you’ve built up to be this huge thing, but then kind of telling yourself, “Well, I only need to do 10 minutes.” To me that was like a huge help.
Yvette: It’s a very big mental exercise, isn’t it?
Lori: Mmm.
Yvette: It’s not about the physical or the time … “you don’t have the time.” You do have the time, it’s just that there is a mental block.
Lori: Yeah.
Yvette: And you’re not sure what to do next. Well, you can think of a lot of other things to do, and it’s just because for some reason you just don’t feel comfortable, or you feel that the time needs to be right, or the atmosphere, or that it’s too warm or it’s too cold ,or you know, 15 other things running through your mind: “What else can I do?” Instead of the thing you should do.
Lori: Yeah, umm… a lot of those things you mention, like finding all these other things that you want to do instead of the thing you should be doing…I think those are all kind of avoidance strategies to protect you from, you know, the thing that you’re afraid of in…to begin with is that, “Oh, it won’t be good enough” or “It’s going to be hard” or “People aren’t going to like it.” You know, those are all the things going in the back of your mind that have you…
Yvette: “What’s the point of this?”
Lori: Yeah, Exactly. Exactly. So it’s all just avoidance.
Yvette: That’s what it is. If…umm…when I’m…as a writer, I often come across things that I’m not sure in the end to anyone would even care about or like, and I have to do it all because I like it, and then it’s harder. But on the other hand, I do have to say that once I make it enjoyable for myself, I give myself, say, a treat at the end of it. Like, I give myself some reward. Then I can actually get it going. You cannot…you know, there’s one thing I really want to do, a movie I really want to see, or a TV show I don’t want to miss, then I’m telling myself, “You can’t watch it until you finish the task at hand.”
Lori: Okay, yeah that’s a good strategy.
Yvette: So not punishment but reward.

Final Words

This concludes our conversation on procrastination and perfectionism, at least for the time being. Now if I can only find the perfect topic for the perfect podcast, we’ll be back soon with another episode. Until then, you can find the archive of all our old episodes as well as the full transcripts and vocabulary lists on our website, BetterAtEnglish.com. Thanks for listening, and bye for now!

VOCABULARY

(Download the pdf for vocabulary notes)
cover
tricky
kicking my butt
pretty much
hack
screw around
cheesy
dorking around
daunting
find 15 ways around
big deal
in the back of your mind
the task at hand

Real English Conversations: Perfectionism 2

Lori — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:12:08 +0000

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Introduction
Hi, Lori here welcoming you to another episode of Real English Conversations from BetterAtEnglish.com. In today’s conversation, my friend Yvette and I continue our discussion about perfectionism. The main focus of this part of the conversation is how perfectionist tendencies can cause problems in foreign language learning, particularly for adult learners. Another thing that comes up is a couple of usage differences between British and American English. So without further ado, here is the conversation:

Conversation Transcript

Lori: But you know, speaking about correction, it’s kind of interesting when you think about learning a language as an adult, how perfectionism and having, like, demands on yourself when it comes to performing…I think that’s one of the biggest differences between learning the language as an adult and, then, picking one up as a child.

Yvette: Yeah I remember when I was in university at the very beginning in the first year I spoke British English with a British English accent, and I was studying American English or American studies. And I had a lot of American-speaking professors who, umm, just, you know, I thought it was really odd to be using British language to talk to an American professor, so I switched to American English, which was really frowned upon because it was not the “proper” language. And everything that you did, every word you used, you had to think, “Is this the proper American word or is it a British-ism?” Because it was…you were punished much more severely for using British-isms as an American speaker than if you were a British speaker using American words. It was really weird.

Lori: Yet there’s this kind of weird…at least in some classroom contexts…there’s this weird elitism when it comes to British English and American English, and like there’s these weird synthetic rules about what you’re allowed to say and what’s acceptable and what isn’t. And, you know, native speakers out in the world, they mix and match as they see fit.

Yvette: Right. Right, because, like, I would have to look out and make sure that I didn’t use the word “pavement,” and you can say that very American-like…pavement…and then they would be like, “No, it’s ’sidewalk.’ So, you’re wrong.” And it’s like, “Oh, you know what I mean, though!”

I know that I got punished for that, and there were other things like “ten after six” or “ten past six”…I, you know, if you say something like “ten past six” in American voice it’s really wrong because you have to say “ten after six,” which is something I didn’t even know until I was corrected. And it was like, “Oops, I didn’t know there was a difference.”

Lori: Wow, well, speaking as American I would say say that’s something I didn’t even know.

[Laughter]

Yvette: There you go! So, but then you get to the perfection level, then you want to be absolutely correct.

Lori: But yeah, sometimes I wish I could get back to the state that I remember having as a kid. You know — when I’m trying to create something and start battling with perfectionist tendencies and procrastination and all the demands I place on myself, and the ones that I imagine that other people are placing on me — I wish I could just throw it all out the window and just approach it with the carefree abandon that I remember having as a little kid.

Yvette: The thing of course is when you…now you work, and it actually…you make money doing things and people expect a certain standard of you, and you try to hold to that standard but often that standard is in your own head and it’s not even what they’re expecting you to do. So you end up doing a lot more work for something that is really not worth the money that you get paid for it.
Lori: Yeah. There is that as well.

Yvette: On top of that! But you know, as a kid I think I was already quite perfectionist in everything, I… everything had to be perfect, everything had to be done properly.

Lori: Yeah.

Yvette: And I felt like I was going to get punished if I didn’t, so that — not to say anything bad about my parents, but, because I don’t think they ever held me to that standard; they always said, “Do your best and that’s good enough.” But for me it had to be perfect, and then it’s maybe “okay.”

Lori: Yeah. Yeah, but, but even so I can still remember, like, approaching new things and just being willing to just try new things that I knew I was going to suck at, because there’s no way you can be good at something right at the very beginning. And it just didn’t matter; you were willing to just give it a go anyway. And now I really sympathize with the people, my, my students that I used to have when I taught English, my adult students, how horrible it can be to sit in a group…and you know you need to try to speak the language but you know you’re going to make mistakes and you know it’s not going to be right but you have to force yourself to try anyway. And it’s…I think, yeah, for people like me anyway, it’s really hard to force yourself to do that.

Yvette: Well yeah it is, it is about letting go of the judgment that other people are going to have. You know, when I, went I went to the United States for the first time and I felt really kind of embarrassed about speaking English, people were very surprised that you were able to even speak the language and understand what they were saying because they had no idea of what you were saying if you spoke Dutch. I mean, they were like, you know, I could switch to Dutch and they were like, “I don’t know, that sounds really strange and odd.” And so that kind of helped me along at the time because I knew that my, you know, what I could do or how I could speak was better than what they could speak my language, and they very often would say, “Well, you speak better English than I do.” And I thought, “Oh, I don’t think so.”

Lori: Yeah, well you know most…your English is fantastic, as you know, as I’ve often told you.

Yvette: Well, thank you.

Lori: But…

Yvette: That’s right!

Lori: But, even so, most Americans, they’re just amazed that anyone can speak a language other than their own, because even though I think most of us do study a foreign language in high school, oftentimes it never gets past the classroom level, you know, the school level, where really, you can do okay on written tests but you can’t really have a conversation.

Yvette: Yeah, and that’s the thing, and it’s also, you know, other little phrases that people use all the time when they speak, which is probably what this is all about. it’s just speaking and listening to people just talking…normal phrases instead of these textbook phrases that nobody understands anyway. I mean, or nobody uses.

Lori: Yeah, they’re so far removed from what you hear out in the real world that it’s…

Yvette: Right. “I would like a hotel room…”

Lori: Please, for one. Please.

Yvette: With a bath. With a bath and a shower.

[Laughter]

Final Words

That’s all for this time. In our next conversation, we’ll be talking about some of the British and American English usage questions that came up in this conversation, particularly with respect to the prepositions “past” and “after” when talking about time. As always, the full transcript and vocabulary notes for this podcast are available on our website, BetterAtEnglish.com. Thanks for listening, and bye for now!

Vocabulary list
Download full vocabulary notes here

Picking one up
frowned upon
synthetic
mix and match
look out
There you go!
throw it all out the window
carefree abandon
end up
there is that
on top of that
suck
give it a go
letting go
far removed

How to find English idioms that aren’t in the dictionary

Lori — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 00:21:34 +0000

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Hello and welcome to Better at English, the podcast that focuses on real English for real people. My name is Lori, and today I’m going to give you a quick and easy way to find the meaning of idioms that aren’t in your dictionary.

Idioms are notoriously difficult for non-native speakers, because they usually don’t make sense if you translate them word for word. For example, the idiom “to kick the bucket” has nothing to do with buckets and everything to do with dying. Most learners are eager to learn about idioms because native speakers use them so frequently. So understanding idioms is important for understanding native speakers, and for sounding more native-like yourself!

If you are reading or listening to B@E, you are probably already and independent learner of English who is used to looking up idioms in your dictionary. If you’re really keen, you might even have a special dictionary of idioms. Dictionaries are indispensable tools for learning the meaning of idiomatic words and phrases. But they are not perfect: we’ve all experienced the frustration of discovering that the idiom we’re looking just isn’t in our dictionary. Luckily, there is a simple trick for finding idioms on the Internet. Here is how you do it:

Go to Google and search for the word idiom plus the key words from your idiom. The search results are almost guaranteed to lead you to a helpful definition. Here is an example:

Imagine you heard this conversation:

Michael: Would you mind if I tried your new guitar?
Lori: Sure, knock yourself out!

The idiom is “knock yourself out,” or “to knock oneself out,” in the dictionary form.

To find the meaning of this idiom, do a Google search for the word
idiom
and add the phrase “knock yourself out” in quotation marks.
Like this:
idiom “knock yourself out”

All you need to do is scroll through the results, which, with luck, will be a combination of online dictionary definitions and online forum discussions. Make sure to check out any forum discussions that you find; they often contain interesting and useful discussions about meaning and usage and give you far more insight than you will get from a dictionary definition.

If you don’t get useful results on your first search, try adjusting your search query. For example, for “knock yourself out” you can try
idiom “knock oneself out”
or
idiom knock oneself out

Google is not a perfect corpus by a long shot, but it is a fantastic tool for doing quick’n'dirty research into meaning and usage. I highly recommend that you spend a few minutes reading the Google search help file so that you can take full advantage of this wonderful tool.

I use the trick I’ve shown you today all the time; in fact, Google is my number one reference tool for double-checking my native-speaker intuition. This is just one of several tips that I’ll be sharing with you over the coming weeks. I hope you find it useful.

That’s all for now; thanks so much for listening. As always, you can find the full transcript at our website, www.betteratenglish.com. Bye for now!

Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms (Online, free!)