It's the Tuesday before Spring Break and the time is 11 PM. Tomorrow, in about twelve hours, I have a government midterm worth 40% of my final grade and this very article I'm writing is due shortly after. I'm just now starting the article and still need to finish reviewing for the exam. Literally FML.
If my life were a movie, this would be the part where I look into the camera and ask, "you're probably wondering how I got here." There'd be a rewind for some context, then it's Tuesday 11 PM again, and next thing you know, I have it all figured out and I'm relaxing on a beach somewhere finally on break. But my life isn't a movie and the reality is I'm stressed because of one glaringly obvious reason: procrastination.
Now in my defense, the week before any major break is usually jam-packed with due dates. Students worn out from the semester and ready to go on break often find themselves grinding to write papers, finish lab reports, and study for midterm exams seemingly all at once. And there isn't much room to mess up, since assignments due right before break are worth enough to be the difference between an A and a B, passing and failing.
But let's focus on the phenomenon of procrastination. We all participate in it, some more than others. It's what we'd rather be doing instead of working on the tasks at hand. Sometimes it's semi-productive; perhaps we decide to work on a math assignment that's due at the end of the week instead of the European studies essay due tomorrow.
Usually, it's not though. We just flat out ignore our obligations until the last possible minute because we instead wanted to finish the new Netflix original everyone keeps talking about. In my case, it was watching that raunchy satire "Sausage Party" with the vulgar anthropomorphic food on Netflix. Good stuff. Whatever it is, there's always something we'd rather do than work on what we need to.
Why do students procrastinate? What factors contribute to the culture of putting things off until later?
In the Information Age, students are constantly bombarded with technological temptation. We clutch smart phones as if they were solid gold bricks. High-speed internet, streaming media, and instant messaging are available at the touch of a button. We receive dozens (if not hundreds) of notifications daily. A five-minute study break on YouTube quickly turns into a hour or two. More time is spent on choosing the proper study music to listen to rather than actual studying.
Many students think that they like the time-sensitive pressure of procrastination. They claim that they get their best work done or that they otherwise can't focus without a time constraint, but this is misleading. That adrenaline rush we get from procrastination isn't the product of procrastination itself, but the relief we experience when we finish the task at hand. You know what I'm talking about. The same feeling you get when you finally press submit on that quiz at 11:59, twenty seconds before midnight. That relief when you hand in your 10 page research paper that you wrote the night before to your 8 AM professor.
But why do we do it to ourselves? That's a question I can't answer for anyone but myself.
I do it because I'm generally somewhat productive, but I either underestimate the amount of time it takes to dedicate to a task. Or it's because I have random spurts of super-laziness where I'll be chilling in my bed until the last possible second for me to get to class on time. But I definitely don't procrastinate as much as I used to, and here's why.
Spring 2018 has been my best academic semester at UT (so far). I haven't skipped a class, I do most, if not all, of my assignments and readings for each week the weekend before so I can just listen to what the professor is saying instead of worrying about what to copy down. As a result, my weekdays are way more manageable and my weekends are productive (during the day at least, nighttime is reserved for college shenanigans). I found myself having way more free time than I usually have, enough that I felt I could fit writing for Odyssey and Spark Magazine into my schedule. My grades are better, and I'm happier because I'm not so stressed out.
Even though this article was written relatively last minute, I'm happy to say that my procrastination on this is an outlier and no longer the norm. And it can be for you too, just try damn it. Your future self will thank you for it.
