Blank stares at the wall. Heads on the desk with paper sprawled all over. The zombified eyes scrawling over words not read on a buzzing laptop about to die. Report to the library anytime, and you will find these actions occurring across the room ad nauseam. It is the appearance of a brain-dead student struggling with bouts of procrastination.
It is said to be a part of the college experience. Several articles I have explored cited college students to be the most aggressive offenders of procrastination. If procrastination was a disease, university campuses would be a hot spot for the contagion. Being so overbooked and overworked, students are constantly spreading themselves too thin and assignments of the utmost importance get thrown to the wayside. Where did this come from? How can it be helped?
Procrastination, as described by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is “to put off intentionally the doing of something that should be done.” You are probably procrastinating on something while reading this. I probably procrastinated writing certain portions of this article. It is something often subliminal to the consciousness.
Time will pass and you discover that that statistics assignment you set thirty minutes aside to get back to has now left the café because you stood it up. Several of your assignments have felt the disgrace of your neglect and you have begun to give yourself a bad reputation as a serial flaker.
Lisa Zarick and Robert Stonebraker in their journal article, “I’ll Do it Tomorrow: The Logic of Procrastination,” describe procrastination as “not an irrational personality disorder; it is a logical, albeit potentially inefficient, behavior driven by a reasoned comparison of perceived costs and benefits.” As a student, you are constantly debating what economists (and the people in this article) like to call “opportunity costs.” For those 30 minutes you spent on a boring date with your statistics homework, you could have instead spent 30 minutes laughing with your friends at a bar.
But this is where things go downhill. Your delegation of your school tasks begin to reflect in your performance. Procrastination leads to lower quality work, cramming information and, thus, lower grades in return.
You are constantly chasing temporal relief from deadlines only for them to inevitably appear anyway. The avoidance of one task by doing another is a no-go too.
Your assignments still await you even after you folded that pile of clothes on the floor. No gold star for that, unfortunately. Not optimizing your time as a student only worsens the workload and the headache of your duties.
“The moral of the story is that people procrastinate so they can lead a better mental life.” reports Trisha Gura in her article “I’ll Do it Tomorrow.” Obviously, procrastination is not malicious. The cause of procrastination is, as stated before, a road paved with good intentions. Fear of failure, overwhelming tasks and burnout are strong causes for procrastinating.
Fear of failure underlies many students’ decision to procrastinate. That writing assignment seems way too daunting, the equations feel like they are too complex.
You put it off as if in days time you will suddenly gain the gumption (yes, one of my articles describes “gumption” as the opposite to procrastinating) to answer everything right.
From a writer’s standpoint, sometimes you need to write the bad stuff to get to the good stuff.
The task itself may feel too overwhelming to start. So much post-procrastination clarity begins when you get to the assignment you had been pushing off only to realize it was not that hard. We have all been there. I have also heard people (specifically the voices in my head) say, “I am best working under pressure! I like deadlines to be soon!” This is not productivity, this is instant gratification.
Finally, burnout. Being overbooked has finally gotten to you and now you are dragging your feet more than ever. Procrastinating starts to feel like torture here because the more your brain cannot function on one assignment, the more backed you are on the several other ones. It is lethal.
With all these factors accounted for, where is the solution? And why does procrastinating seem to be the default in any hardship we, as students, face? Unfortunately, it’s going to be breaking a really bad habit. Because pushing through procrastination means pushing through mounds of discomfort and commitment issues.
It means learning to trust yourself and trusting your ability to make smarter decisions. It means making planned time to knock out assignments when you know they are upcoming.
It means reframing the mindset of pushing things off. College students are some of the most burnt out and busiest demographic of people. Our time is precious and honoring that time is learning to plan ahead.
Making an effort to plot your schedule out is a crucial step towards having a productive week.
Figuring out which classes you dread working on the most and getting those out the way first can be very helpful. Your hardest, most time-consuming tasks should also come first, then menial ones.
Keep distractions out of your line of sight like your phone or any electronics. Let your work come first.
These are just a couple of tips that can be useful to you in pursuit of more productive study sessions.
Procrastinating is not as simple as just “stopping.” It can feel all-consuming and an easy way out. But you have every opportunity to start afresh and begin each week with better, stronger skills of combatting it!
When it comes to procrastination, remember the hardest part is starting.