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This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at MUJ chapter.
What do you imagine when you think of a procrastinator? A lazy sloth, irresponsible slacker, unfocused and drifting through life. It’s always painted with a negative brush but what actually is procrastination? The process of delaying or putting things off for later. There’s nothing inherently negative about the meaning per se, and yet, society has given it such a bad reputation. Let’s face it–we’ve all been there, desperately scrambling at the last moment to finish our work on time and it’s not just you and me, famous notable figures like Leonardo Da Vinci, Steve Jobs, and Thomas Edison– have all admitted to being procrastinators and guess what? They still achieved great success.
Truth be told, it’s the only loyal companion that sticks with you till the end of college life (whether your friends do or not). It’s not just a habit–it’s a lifestyle. A skill mastered through experience. While it’s portrayed as your greatest enemy, it could just be your stepping stone to success. It may sound too good to be true but here is the only guide you need to master your way through using procrastination for your benefit.
The Last-Minute Miracle
While procrastinating, we let tasks be till the last moment but maybe that is when the best ideas emerge. Think of it like when you are not doing chores, you are giving your brain time to stew over ideas, processing and refining them subconsciously while you doom scroll through memes. When the deadline is looming and the pressure is on, your brain goes into a problem-solving frenzy, the pressure guiding you to clarity, filtering out unwanted thoughts, zoning in on what truly matters and using your ideas to produce the most efficient, time-effective solutions. The pressure pushes you to take shortcuts, think outside the box, and make decisions you’d never consider if you had weeks to plan. So, the next time you find yourself procrastinating do not panic, just remember you are waiting to harness that ‘urgent’ energy to fuel creative brilliance.
Procrastination leads to adaptability
When we leave things to the last moment, we don’t have time to consider many alternative solutions. Yes, it is stressful but under the pressure, our brains stop overthinking and tap into intuition and past experiences to make snap decisions and pull off solutions that would otherwise have taken a much longer time to figure out. It’s like training that helps us to think fast, make decisions on the go, and handle uncertainty and chaotic situations like a pro. Over time we become flexible thinkers and major stress managers. Adaptability thrives on this ability to think flexibly. All of this happens while you get enough time to binge-watch your favourite shows or finish that long-awaited book. Life is full of unexpected twists, and people who can pivot quickly have higher chances of success in life.
The Strategy to Work Less
Procrastination makes us more efficient. Yes, it does. The luxury to ponder over every tiny little detail is no longer available to us so we instinctively cut through distractions and focus only on the most necessary parts. This is the essence of Parkinson’s Law, which states that work expands to fill the time available for completion, i.e., if you have a week to write an assignment you will take a whole week but if you have only three hours remaining until submission, you will somehow miraculously do it in three hours. So instead of working for a whole week, you just have to put in effort for three hours.
The Way to Stress-Proof Yourself
The fact is procrastination leads to stressful scenarios but on the brighter side, we also learn how to better handle such situations. Constantly working under pressure, procrastinators become desensitized to stress that may be overwhelming to other people. Such people develop emotional resilience and have the ability to stay calm and composed even in stressful situations. This is similar to how athletes train under stressful situations to build endurance. Such people have confidence in their ability to pull through stressful challenges and embrace urgency and channel it into productivity.
So maybe procrastination is not really the enemy. While everyone is telling you to ‘just start early,’ let’s be honest that’s not how brilliance works. As is clear now, procrastination has a lot of benefits, be it problem-solving, fuelling creativity or handling high-stress situations, procrastination helps with all of this. It helps you to think fast, prioritize and use the adrenaline rush in the best ways possible. The next time you find yourself procrastinating, don’t panic, just chill and trust your brain’s ability to stir up a solution when the time comes. The key is to accept that you’re going to procrastinate. There’s no point fighting it. No matter how many times you think “I’ll finish this assignment today” you are going to go back to putting it off till the last moment. Just learn to work with it. It’s possible you don’t produce the best piece of work under pressure but at least it gets the work done. So go ahead, procrastinate, and make your peace with the chaos.
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