Hi, my name is Meridyth and I’m a procrastinator.
Procrastination is a disease that millions of people suffer from annually. Help a sister out and send me your notes, yeah?
No, but seriously, I do procrastinate. I can’t help it! It’s in my bones! Well, I probably could stop but I procrastinate stopping procrastinating soooo… Can you blame me though? When given the choice between revision, essay writing, and quizzes OR Netflix? The choice seems pretty obvious to me, no?
The biggest problem that faces modern procrastinators is success (followed closely by the soul-crushing stress). Sounds odd right? Well if it sounds odd to you then it’s probably because you don’t procrastinate (tell me your secret?!), you do your work on time and for that, I salute you! But for those of us who procrastinate, success doesn’t help us overcome this educational hazard, it furthers the procrastination disease and will ultimately be my downfall!
It’s the same reason your parents didn’t buy you that sweet when you were 3 and having a tantrum in Tesco’s: because we don’t reward bad behaviour!
Well… except when it comes to teachers grading the work of procrastinators. Most of the time they don’t know who started a month before the deadline and who started the day of it (unless a procrastinator has done a really bad job in which case it’s INCREDIBLY obvious! So, they grade following the marking scheme and low and behold, I, a world-renowned procrastinator, get a B. I learn that procrastination works, and I live to procrastinate another day.
The amount of time before the deadline and how much the work is worth means nothing to me! Not until three days before when blind panic sets in and I have to get to work, write the essay and pray I meet the deadline. Except I don’t start working because I’m panicked, and I can’t work when I’m panicked so I have to distract myself by watching Netflix. Can you see the problem here????
I don’t know why I procrastinate, I have a theory that as a kid my parents helped me too much with my homework, so I didn’t put in as much effort as those who got less help and thus the procrastinator within me was born! But that’s just me blaming my parents for my personal problems, which while in some cases may be justified, seeing as I’m an adult woman and haven’t received help from them for my school work since I was 10 (if that), I don’t think that the blame for my procrastination here is justified. So, I guess I don’t actually know why I procrastinate.
Truth is I don’t think many people do know the reason, we just do it (or rather we don’t). Same as how my flatmate starts working a month before the deadline, I start days before, we’re different people, we revise differently, and hey if it works for us then what’s the problem?
This brings me to my next point! You know your friendly neighborhood procrastinator who gets good grades and you hate them for it? Well, stop hating them for it! There’s no need and it’s a waste of energy. Simply put there are some people who can write an A1 worthy essay in a month but if they only had 3 days then they’d fail miserably! The same can be said for the opposite, there are some people who can write a stellar article in 3 days but if they were forced to write that same article for an entire month then they’d fail!
Yes, they have more time but that just means more time to revise and edit the essay, to lose your point, to change the essay’s message, to answer the question wrong even though you thought you were writing it better.
I don’t know if I could write an essay worthy of an A1 if I used the whole month (truth is I’ve never tried) but I know I can write a good essay in a few days. Even though I think procrastination is one of my worst study habits, I also know it works for me and that when I need to, I can start earlier than 3 days before the deadline.
So, if you want to hate me for passing my tests because I’ve procrastinated until the last minute then that’s fine, I get it. But at the end of the day the pressure of the time crunch works for me, so maybe one day I’ll change it (hopefully before my dissertation is due!), but if I do it’ll be because I think it’s what’s best, not because other people say that it’s wrong.
all images sourced from Google