Truth be told, I didn’t know binge-watching existed until I got to college, where I was introduced to the charming Netflix and his best friend, Hulu, the two sworn enemies to any college student who has been given a deadline. It's just one more episode, right? That one more episode turns into one more season and eventually that one more season has you at...season seven. How did this happen? Here’s an interesting fact: According to a study at Texas Tech University, 68 percent of all college students admit to having used Netflix to binge-watch a television show at some point.
At the middle of every semester, I’ve been known to catch on to this horrid plight of binge-watching. "Friends?" Check. "Pysch?" Check. "Dexter?" Double check. Let’s not forget the fact that I just finished watching all nine seasons of the "Office." I’m now at the point where I’ve debated on changing the passwords to something I won’t remember just so I can get some studying time done. Sometimes, I think Netflix is trying to help me out with the notorious pop up, “Do you want to continue?” box or maybe they’re silently judging me as I click yes. The ability to watch whatever I want on demand is taking its toll on college life and I think it’s a black hole we’ve all fallen into, but more so, is that we’ve all experienced procrastination.
You can’t fool any college student since we all seem to be master procrastinators. I’ve seen and done it all when it comes to this skill. Binge-watching is just one, very basic tool we have when it comes to cranking down on our school work. For instance, you have the old school doodling on your paper and if you have no paper, your arm some how manages to turn into a lovely canvas sold at the Louvre. Then there’s the "how many times can I scroll through Facebook in hopes of finding a better post even though I just checked a second ago." And the best? Completely avoiding the task because let’s be honest, it’s due on Friday, right? That’s about 22 hours away and I’ve got more important stuff to do, like reorganizing my drawers.
While this is all fun and games, I did realize the problems I’ve come across in doing this. See, in high school, we weren’t really taught the concept of due dates. If there was a deadline, you can sure bet the assignment was easy enough to do the night before (unless you count this one time in band camp).
Procrastination was just the way of life, which goes to say I did watch all of "Game of Thrones" with my grandmother senior year and yet I still didn’t think it was binge-watching. Imagine taking a kid fresh out of this and plucking them right into the three essays due all on Monday, 2000 words a pop, and five more tests on to that. That my dear friends, is a disaster waiting to happen. I went in with the “It’s all good. I got this guys.” To the “Oh hey, a new episode of 'Lucifer' is on” while the essay’s due date is slowly creeping up on me.
I can’t say I’ve really mastered not procrastinating. It’s hard when giving so many days and weeks to do a project and you think you have all the time in the world. Avoiding the essay isn’t the best thing to do in any circumstance, no matter how dreadful the subject is or how much you really want to finish that last episode.
