Ahhh, procrastinating. It’s something very prevalent in college, but people of all ages do it. (If someone tells you they’ve never procrastinated, they’re lying.) For those of you who “don’t know” what procrastination is, it’s putting off something that needs to be done. You can procrastinate on anything from homework to chores to errands. Everyone who procrastinates goes through similar steps and have similar thoughts throughout the process. Here are five things all procrastinators have in common.
1.) Procrastinators hate when people try to tell us why we procrastinate. Society loves to find a reason for everything. Psychology tries to tell us we procrastinate because we have an underlying fear of failure. Excuse me, but I’m a student in the honors college- I have no concerns of failing. Honestly, most of us procrastinate because we don’t feel like working and we prioritize fun things over the boring things that need to be done.
2.) We’ve all tried countless times to stop procrastinating. There have been numerous times in a procrastinator’s life where they say, “I will never procrastinate again.” Sometimes, they actually mean it however, most of the time they get pulled back to the dark side. We’ve tried all the tips and tricks we see on Pinterest. We've tried to surround ourselves with non-procrastinators and it didn’t work. We've tried to motivate ourselves by thinking of what we could potentially lose if we failed an assignment, and it didn’t work. We tried breaking down assignments into bite sized pieces and it worked! Just kidding, we procrastinated on every bite sized piece until we were left with the whole assignment again.
3.) We know days before the deadline that we’re going to be stressed if we procrastinate. (But we still do it.) This goes through every procrastinator’s head the week something is due. We know on Tuesday that we’re going to be stressed on Sunday when that big paper is due the next day and we haven’t started it yet. We know that we’re going to hate ourselves when we have an anatomy exam in 3 days and we haven’t opened our book in weeks. It doesn’t matter the situation or how big the level of stress is, we will still procrastinate. We’re hot messes.
4.) While we are rushing to finish that assignment due in 3 hours, 20 minutes and 18 seconds, we start to think of excuses of why we didn’t start earlier. We think things like, “I had to watch Grey’s Anatomy,” or “I had to go out to dinner with my friends last night, I can’t just starve myself.” We try to justify our procrastinating because obviously we “had no choice”. If we’re successful at coming up with excuses, we don’t feel as bad for putting off things.
5.) After we submit the assignment or finish our exam, we take a deep breath and think “Well that wasn’t so bad.” After all the stress releases and the scary task is completed, we feel like we can do anything. (We probably won’t though because we’re procrastinators remember?) This is probably why we keep procrastinating. Like I said earlier, we’re hot messes.
Procrastination is just a fancy word for "putting off big tasks as long as possible." Everyone has procrastinated at least once in their lifetime. We all go through the same process. We've tried to change, we know it's going to stress us out in the end, yet we still put things off. That doesn't make us bad people or students. Procrastinating is a part of life and it's what makes us human.
