The incessant ringing of my alarm that I have come to detest begins chiming at a bright and early 7:30 a.m. and I hit snooze so robotically that I am not even conscious of what I’m doing. Fifteen minutes and four unpleasant visits into my room by my mother later, I finally roll out of bed around 7:45am and (hopefully) land on my feet. Willing my eyelids to open just enough so that I can make it across my room (amongst the obstacles of clothes and shoes strewn across the floor in front of me) to my closet, I am silently cursing myself for staying up until 3 a.m. for what seems like the 365th day this year. This was the start to almost every weekday morning of my burgeoning youth starting in middle school and continuing through the day I walked across the lawn to receive my high school diploma.
I was patiently waiting for the time to come when my days would no longer be so chock full of activities that my notion of a good night’s sleep became a sufficiently long nap, and then ultimately just turned into a quick shutter of the eyelids before the sun rose again. After seven hours of school each day (which now seems absolutely absurd in comparison to my more typical college schedule of two to three hours of class each day), three hours of soccer or lacrosse practice, immediately followed by four hours of dance practice, I would finally return home around 10 or 11 p.m., shower, eat dinner, and then get started on my hours of homework and studying for the next day. I kept telling myself that I just had to keep working like this until graduation because then all of my activities would be over and I would have all the free time in the world. I would finally know what it was like to finish my homework on time and get those recommended eight hours of sleep each night like so many of my other friends. Little did I know how very confused and woefully unaware I was.
I got to college and my schedule of extracurricular activities instantly eased. I was motivated to do well in school (ah, freshman year), and I figured I’d start living a much healthier lifestyle now that I had time to establish a more civilized sleep schedule and balance my schoolwork with my now much less demanding schedule of activities. It only took me about two weeks into my freshman year of college before I finally grasped the concept that it didn’t matter how much free time I had to do all of my homework and then some. I was still going to wait to start it until 1am the night before. I was a procrastinator to my core.
I’ve come to realize that cramming my days full of sports and dance in high school was just my proclivity for procrastination disguised in a much healthier way than it currently exhibits itself, which is typically in the form of watching hours of Tasty videos and British X Factor auditions on YouTube. But I’ve come to a much more productive realization as well: my penchant for procrastination is not such a negative thing. I’ve determined that procrastinating is not necessarily indicative of a lazy or unmotivated work ethic. On the contrary, I now understand that I am most highly motivated and definitely most productive when there is an imminent deadline written (and underlined, highlighted, and starred) in my planner. I choose to work under self-induced stress because that is truly when I am the most efficient and productive.
Unfortunately, it took me until I got to college to shift from vehement denial to enlightened acceptance, and I have only recently learned how to use my tendency towards procrastination to my advantage (she says, as she sits in the deserted library writing this article at 2:39 a.m. with two presentations and a paper due tomorrow).
To all of those who are reading this and cringing at the thought of starting a 10-page paper the night before it’s due (or so I hear some people do…), I respect your forethought and your desire to avoid stressful situations. But to the few who look down upon those of us who are in the library “finishing up” (starting) a term paper right before the end of the semester in pity and contempt, I ask that you take a second to realize that maybe we’re actually choosing this lifestyle. Like many things in life, introverts and extroverts, early-birds and night-owls, Chipotle and Qdoba -- make all the comments you want but I stand by this -- being a procrastinator and being the type of person to get something done a week in advance is not so much a case of better versus worse as it is just a case of being different. And being different is not such a bad thing at all. And I’m going to wrap it up with that, because seriously, I have a 10-page paper to write.
