Inside the mind of a master procrastinator Advanced shadowing lesson
Tim Urban tells his TED audience how he planned to spread his 90-page senior thesis over a whole year, then wrote it in 72 hours, and jokes that his school loved it. Now a blogger, he explains why he began writing about procrastination and shows scans of a non-procrastinator's brain and his own.
What you practise by shadowing it
- Phrasal verbs said as one unit: spread the work out, start off light, bump it up, kick it up into high gear.
- Time running out, step by step: two months turned into one month, which turned into two weeks.
- A phone call told in the present tense: And they say, "Is this Tim Urban?" And I say, "Yeah."
- Advanced
- Video
- 3:57
- 58 sentences
Practise it in the app
Free, no account needed. The app plays one sentence and waits for you to say it.
First sentences
So in college, I was a government major, which means I had to write a lot of papers.
Now, when a normal student writes a paper, they might spread the work out a little like this.
So, you know -- you get started maybe a little slowly,
but you get enough done in the first week that, with some heavier days later on,
everything gets done, things stay civil.
The video has 58 sentences. The rest are in the app. Practise them all
Words and phrases
- procrastinator
- a person who keeps putting things off
- thesis
- a long piece of writing for a university degree
- deadline
- the last day or time to finish something
- spread the work out
- do a little of the work at a time
- get started
- begin doing something
- all-nighters
- nights spent awake working
- kick it up into high gear
- start working much faster and harder
- no big deal
- not important; not a problem
- supposed to
- should, as planned
- turned into
- became
- planned things out
- made a careful plan
How to practise this clip
- Listen for the rhythm: which words are strong and where the speaker breathes.
- Say each sentence at the speaker's speed, as one smooth phrase.
- Score your tries to see which words did not come through, then practise those sentences again.
Want to practise every day? See the 15-minute routine.
Source
Tim Urban at TED, on YouTube
