Procrastination

I hate procrastination, but I am an expert at it. Procrastination has been ingrained in my life for as long as I can remember and college life just intensified that lifestyle to the point where I adopted as my second major. But I see that that is not only limited to my case. The moment I say “I just procrastinated until the last minute,” there are several compassionate nodding heads from my dear colleagues. So, why do we procrastinate? I mean we all know that it is bad and we all know we will be ripping our hair out when the deadline approaches. However, for some reason, we never seem to learn from the debacle created by procrastination. I read an interesting article about procrastination from USC’s campus news paper, Daily Trojan, about college student’s beloved topic—procrastination. This article offers seven ingenious categorization of procrastination that many can fervidly related to: mañana (I’ll do it tomorrow if…), grasshopperism (“I need to have fun beforehand”), escapism (“I need to get out of here and clear my head”), impulsiveness (“I need to change my major/ my university”), music and reading (“I’ll relax and then I’ll do it”) and cavalry to the rescue (“to morrow will be a snow day and class will be cancelled”). After going through this category, I realized that I have mastered all these stages some point in my life. Indeed, procrastination is not the best habit to get used to, but it is not such a sinful habit that needs to be (and probably will be whether you want it or not) punished. Another interesting handout about procrastination states that perfectionism and procrastination go hand in hand. Also, sometimes procrastination simply works. The rush of adrenaline, the slightly healthy level of stress induces you to perform and sometimes perform better than your normal set range. And guess what? Sometimes it does speed things up for you. I must say we need to find the fine balance between good amount of procrastination and punctuality. Also, if you have taken time to really relax your mind or preoccupy yourself with other recreation before doing the needed work, can you really call that a wasted time or rather “procrastinated time”? You might as well call that the preparation period before your superpower engine starts couple of hours before the deadline.