Dovilė Armalytė HNMK-7/1

TIM URBAN: INSIDE THE MIND OF A

MASTER PROCRASTINATOR. SPEECH
ANALYSIS

GENERAL INFO
Tim Urban founder of a website Wait But Why (WBW). The site covers a range of topics as a long-
form blog. Typical posts involve various subjects, including artificial intelligence, outer space, and
procrastination ("Wait But Why", 2019) . In February 2016, Urban gave a TED talk on procrastination, how it
affects us in daily lives and when it mostly occurs. Purpose of the talk was to inform how to overcome
procrastination, how to recognize it and how to it can affect us permanently. Procrastination is the avoidance
of performing a task that needs to be completed by a certain time limit. It may also be defined as a
persistent or intentional delay in beginning or completing a task despite knowing it could have negative
consequences. Everybody knows what it is but rarely everybody knows how to explain it, and that is what
Tim Urban is trying to do with his speech, to explain it.

MESSAGE AND THE AUDIENCE

Yet procrastination theme is very boring, and lot of people are talking about this issue, speaker
uses funny and attractive lifetime experiences to catch people’s attention. It is important to mention that
these lifetime experiences were very relevant, especially for people who ever had deadlines or tasks that
had to be done by certain lime limit. Speaker begins with introduction which involves his lifetime
experience in college, which is very clever, because most people meets procrastination feeling exactly
there. In body he introduces procrastination with funny cartoons, he gives cartoonish bodies to
procrastination and rational thinking to simplify the explanation. In conclusion he comes back from the
past lifetime experiences to the present and introduces solutions which can be used now.

Speaker uses spatial and causation design in his speech, explaining topic using causes and
effects, and inviting into imaginary brain tour. Explaining causes and effects can seem to be boring for
some people, so while explaining speaker uses drawings and personification of procrastination and
rational thinking. To support causes and effects Tim uses factual examples, of his experiences which
brings speech to life, and helps listeners to relate to the situations which happened to him before. Since
examples were very simple and from lifetime experiences, they enhanced credibility and clarified the
information.
 ETHOS OF THE SPEAKER
Speaker seemed that he knew what he was talking about, he had enough knowledge to cover
the topic. He was open and honest about information which he was delivering to the audience. Urban
started his speech with relatable situation which happened to many of us, which boosted credibility. Since
it happened to a lot of people it is easy to believe that it really happened. Audience responded positively
for example laughing, smiling which showed that speaker is pleasant, likable and interesting.
Subsequently speaker already had knowledge about topic, writing about it before in his site and doing his
research properly before, he seemed to be assured. To validate his points, he used real-life situations as
examples, also used various illustrations, that were relevant to the topic and made it interesting. While
giving speech he was enthusiastic and energetic, moving around, using a lot of gestures. When all the
dimensions of ethos are joined together speech becomes effective and speaker can impact the listeners.

NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION

When it comes to non-verbal language speaker seems to be stable and relaxed. He is standing
straight and confident, energized and his body language is flowing together with his speech. But speaker
is walking while he is speaking, changing position and location, yet it seems that his body is in control
because his movement at some points reinforced his information. For example: some words like ‘brain’
were enforced with pointing finger to his head, to enforce words which are with higher tone he lifts his
hands also higher, words ‘huge’, ‘big’ are also showed with hands. These gestures helped to convey and
follow the message of the speaker. When it comes to moving, it seems that speaker is moving too much.
He was moving without reason; he was moving when explaining new point and he was moving while
explaining the same point. So, there were too much transitional moving, which worked against him. At
first part of the speech that wasn’t a problem for me, but later it became too distracting.

Eye-contact was also not the best attribute of speaker. He managed to keep the eye contact for
some time, but there were some eye-contact with the floor. Lack of eye-contact can result in decreased
bond with audience, speaker compensated it with humor which increased vocal variety and audience
were not bored. Besides humor, speaker used variety of tone variations, on important points he used
higher pitch to emphasize the point which created diversity and speech was not bland or monotonic.
When he was talking about points that should concern audience, he would show that through his facial
expressions.

REFERENCES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arj7oStGLkU
Wait But Why. (2019, October 29). Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wait_But_Why