So picture this: you’re on your fifth hour of a Schitt’s Creek binge on a Tuesday night. Your classes ended at 4:30 and it is now 9:30. You’re all wrapped up in a blanket, all cozy, with a mountain of snacks to your left and a pile of wrappers to your right. You had a brutal econ exam this morning that you know you bombed and now you’re in the mood for some much-needed me-time. Then it hits you… you have your big English essay due in 3 hours and 29 minutes. The essay that your professor told you about like 6 weeks ago. The essay that you know is worth 25% of your grade. The essay that seemed so far away you didn’t even bother putting writing into your planner. Well shit, you know what happened. You said you wouldn’t do it after that last time, but here you are. You procrastinated, again!
If there is one thing that unites all the people on the planet it would be that we do not like to do work, especially when that work is forced out of us. Remember reading challenges during the summers of elementary school, those used to be so fun, but then you got to middle school and they started making you read for a grade. Ew! Homework is kind of like that to be perfectly honest. We might not have such a hard time learning about a subject if we had any interest in it or if we knew there wouldn’t be a heartbreaking quiz at the end of the chapter. So when we have to do homework over a boring, awful subject we try to put that off for as long as possible because we’re only human, and it’s only natural for us to not want to do things that we don’t like. And to be fair we all know that procrastinating on our work is only making our lives harder, we know it’s bad for us, and we know how stressed out we get when we can see the clock speeding to 12 and we’ve only written the introduction to our essay since writer’s block is real ladies and starting the essay isn’t always the hardest part. However, why do we keep engaging in this self-destructive behavior when we know how terrible it is for our mental and emotional health? It’s because procrastination works.
The reason why we can’t stop procrastinating on all the stuff we have to do is because we still get everything done.
If I straight up failed that English essay that I wrote Tuesday night that I waited 6 whole weeks to write and wrote two and a half hours before it was due, maybe I would start doing things on time. BUT, I didn’t fail, I passed. Sure it wasn’t the 100 I wanted but it was the 83 I needed in order to keep up my procrastination. If I wouldn’t have gotten a B, maybe I would have realized that I need to start being responsible for myself but I managed to make it work, as most of us do when we can hear the clock ticking and the seconds counting down. Maybe if years of procrastination hadn’t made us legit queens at it, we would try to find a better way to planning and studying and checking off all the things on our list.
We also don’t really realize that procrastinating gives us so much time to do other things, and I don’t even necessarily mean leisurely activities. The essay that would have taken a couple hours to write if you wrote it when you didn’t have a pressing deadline took all of 58 minutes to write today. Look at all that extra time that you now have to do other homework that you’ve procrastinated on cause now that you’re out of your cozy bed and onto your desk you might as well, right?
In order to be procrastination pros we just need to be responsible and plan enough that even if we waste a bunch of time doing absolutely nothing, we’re still able to meet our deadlines and get everything done on time. There are a couple of things that we can do to ensure our procrastination journey goes as smoothly as possible. A personal favorite of mine is a planner. Now you might be wondering why, since planning kinda goes against the whole idea of procrastinating. However, when you plan things out you know exactly what your schedule looks like so you can see what extra time you have during the day that you can spend not doing the homework that you know is gonna be due real soon. Essentially, you’ll be planning out your procrastination in order to do it more efficiently.
Procrastination isn’t the villain, it’s really not. It would definitely be better for us to do our work and our chores on time but pushing things off until the very last minute has become a major part of our lives and, personally, I wouldn’t give it up for anything because that means that doing my chem notes is tomorrow-me’s problem and today-me will just be over here watching some more Schitts Creek in the comfy bed that I didn’t actually leave to go write my 812 word english essay.