Overcoming Procrastination or “WHY COULDN’T YOU JUST FINISH YOUR ESSAY?”
The year is 2019. You’ve graduated from high school and went off to college to study your dream profession, or at least something that sounded nice to your parents and got you out of the house. You’ve powered through the ease of syllabus week, the terror of midterms, and now, standing before you, are the almighty finals. You’ve had the assignment for over a month now. It wasn’t anything hard, and you certainly knew what to do, but for some reason, you just couldn’t bring yourself to do it...until now. Now...it’s zero hour. Tonight, at midnight, you either pass or you fail. You’re out of time. But why? Why have you been cursed so? What got you to this horrible position? Why couldn’t you just finish it sooner?
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably been in this situation before, or at least something like it, and what a miserable spot to be in it is. As time ticks ever-closer, you can’t help but think on all of the chances you had to start sooner; the lies you told yourself time and time again. “I’ve got plenty of time!,”“Oh, that? I haven’t even started yet, but you have fun with that,” and my personal favorite: “I’ll be fine, I work better under pressure!” The workload is steep, and there’s only one way forward: you need to do it, no matter the cost. You hate this class, you hate your professor for being so unreasonable, but, worst of all, you know, deep down, it’s your fault; you had the time, you had the power, but you chose to do it later, and later is now.
Hopefully, if you’re reading this, you don’t have anything dire to do (if you do, please...do yourself a favor...go do it). As someone who frequently procrastinates, to the point where it’s almost (but not quite) self-destructive, I have more than enough experience under my belt when it comes to all-nighters, half-hour essays, and last-minute turn-ins. Even now, as I sit here at 3 AM typing this article, a measly nine hours before it’s due, I know what I’ve gotten myself into, and I know that next week I’ll be doing it all over again. However, my poor time-management skills are not the focus of this piece. Rather, I’d like to take this opportunity to help you, dear reader, with your personal struggles with procrastination, so that maybe, just maybe, you can help someone else one day. Before doing that, though, I think it’s important to go over the many stages of procrastination.
If you’re like me, the first thing that comes to mind when you think of procrastinating is that one episode of Spongebob Squarepants where he had to write an 800-word essay for boating school. I always think of how, watching that as a kid, I told myself that I would never do my homework that late...how very wrong I was. Having just recently watched it, I realized how, aside from being incredibly relatable, the episode (appropriately titled “Procrastination”) perfectly represents the stages that one goes through on their stress-inducing journey, from when the homework is assigned to the night before it’s due. With some help from the internet, I’ve divided the procrastinative process down into five distinct events. They are, in order: false security, laziness, excuses, denial, and crisis.
In the first stage, “false security,” you’re first given the assignment. It seems small, and the due date is so imperceptibly far away that you couldn’t possibly be worried by it. This is when you are at your most confident, arrogant, and perhaps even excited about the road ahead. For me, this is when I write down all of my wild ideas and concepts that I’d like to try out.
In the second stage, “laziness,” some time has passed since you were given the assignment, and, rather than getting that head start you had talked about, you’ve opted to lounge around; maybe play some video games or watch a movie. After all, you’ve got so much time, why bother? This stage is the most dangerous part of the process for me because it signifies the shift from ‘wanting to do my work’ to ‘not wanting to do my work.’
In the third stage, you start to make excuses for yourself. These excuses can take many different forms. In my experience, they can be related to events around camus, or bodily functions/needs, such as sleep and hunger. “I can’t do this now! How am I supposed to write when I’m so hungry? I’ll write when I’m less tired, I can’t think straight right now.” These reasons can stack up, one on top of the other, until you’ve spent hours doing things to set up the “perfect” conditions for yourself to do your work, and by then, you’ll find that you don’t want to do it anyway. Maybe you’ve made some headway on the assignment, or maybe you’ve lead yourself so far down your own mental rabbit hole that, after hours of work, you have only the word “the” scrawled across the page in front of you. This leads into the next stage, denial.
This is when things start to get serious. Time’s ticking...closer...closer...you know what you have to do, but you know that, deep down, you can put it off just a little bit longer and still be okay. You tell yourself whatever it takes to calm down, to down-play the reality that you haven’t even started the assignment and you have only a few days left, maybe even a little under a day. “This is fine,” you think to yourself, as your window grows ever smaller with each passing minute. If you haven’t snapped yourself out of it by now, you’re in for a very rude awakening.
The final stage; The moment you’ve been dreading for weeks. It hits you. Like a bus, it smacks into you full-force, and your thoughts run wild. “How could this have happened?” “Why did I do this to myself?” “Is it too late to ask for an extension?” Of course, you know the answers to all of these questions, but they don’t satisfy you. The time has come, and you’re all out of lies to tell yourself. It’s now or never. I like to think back to the Spongebob episode, to when he falls asleep and he dreams of his house ablaze; because that’s exactly how it can feel: like everything is on fire, and you’re helpless to do anything about it. Putting aside the logistics of a pineapple burning underwater, it’s the perfect analogy for that final crisis that we all experience when procrastinating.
So, then, how does one overcome that beastly thing we call procrastination? Well, there are a number of things that we can do. Since procrastination is a process rather than a perpetual event, we can counteract it any time. For example, when we are first given our assignment, it might be best to lay out some sort of plan ahead of time, especially if we know that we have a tendency to slack off. To me, I find it helpful to break my projects up into manageable, bite-sized pieces that can be picked off here and there. That way, I can reward myself, as I would do when procrastinating, while also feeling a sense of progress and accomplishment. If at any time you feel lazy or that you’re making excuses, ask yourself why you’re acting the way you are. If you’re further along, and are in denial about how much time you have to complete your assignment, snap yourself out of it! Wake up! Do whatever you have to do to get yourself to realize that you need to buckle down and get to work. If you’re at the end of the road, and you have mere hours to finish your work, or even start it, know that when that deadline comes, win or lose, it’s all over. Oftentimes, anxiety can blind us, and make it seem as though our problems are a matter of life and death, but (most of the time) they aren’t. Regardless of what you get on that test, or that paper, or that project, you’ll be okay. Your GPA might be worse for wear, but you’ll be okay. Perhaps the best advice I can give is this: at the heart of every bout of procrastination is fear, and confronting that fear, not running from it, is the best way to overcome the mental barriers that you place over yourself.
The process of procrastination is a long, winding road paved with bad choices, and is best to be avoided at all costs. If you should find yourself stumbling down that road, though, please remember my words of advice. I’m sure by now you know fully well the consequences of procrastination on your mental, physical, and emotional wellbeing, and while it may seem terribly alluring to push off your work until the last possible second, there’s a better way - a healthier way - to go about things. Be smart, know your limits, and remember, it’ll all be okay.
