The Bane of My Existence: Procrastination

As usual, I am writing this after lights out on Tuesday night. I finished my homework early, but still managed to play slither.io and stay up until midnight writing a short opinions piece. And it isn’t that I dislike writing op-eds; they’re enjoyable, and easy enough to write that they don’t take up my whole evening. I wasn’t always like this. At the beginning of the year, I wrote my articles on time. I handed them in before 10 p.m. on Sunday, with plenty of time to spare. Since then, I have slowly spiralled into a shameful mess who doesn’t get her articles in on time. What have I done to myself?

You’ve probably experienced this before. It’s called procrastination.

Procrastination is the action, or rather the art, of putting off difficult tasks and deliberately finding methods to distract oneself from responsibilities. Though everybody procrastinates to some extent, about 20 percent procrastinate so much that it impedes their everyday lives. Up to 80 percent of college students chronically procrastinate on their coursework. If a good portion of adults and nearly every college student put off important work, procrastination is a serious concern for the adult population.

What might happen if you procrastinate? You can procrastinate yourself to ill health. By putting off work which must be done, stress levels can increase significantly, causing a slough of health problems from ulcers to diabetes. Procrastination also probably forces you to stay up late to finish, which brings its own problems; the less sleep you get, the better chance you have of getting sick and getting into car accidents if you drive. So why do people procrastinate?

In any case, should you fail to rein in your procrastination, console yourself with this thought: If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute.

There are many reasons. Some people simply do not care for their tasks, while others may care too much; perfectionists can tend to be procrastinators because they expect their output to be flawless. However procrastination manifests itself, most of the time it is caused by the thought of the amount of work that must be done or the nature of the work itself.

It’s natural to procrastinate a little. However, when it begins to hinder your ability to function normally, it becomes dangerous. I don’t have a surefire way to stop you from procrastinating; if I did, I wouldn’t be writing this at 12 a.m. However, I do have some tips that I learned while researching procrastination for this article.

It’s best to get to the root of why you are procrastinating. Once you understand why you put off your work, you can more specifically and effectively target your procrastination. The next time you close your textbook and open up Facebook, ask yourself why you’re going on Facebook, and what you can do to stop.

Another method which cuts out many distractions is to hand off your technology to someone else and tell them to keep it safe until you’ve finished your homework. Because many of our distractions are now online, by taking away the things that allow you to access the Internet, you can cut much of the time-wasting out of your life. In any case, should you fail to rein in your procrastination, console yourself with this thought: If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute.

Perhaps this will help you when you’re studying for finals. I’m going to continue playing slither.io.