What role does procrastination play in your life?

    Procrastination that everyone as Uni students is probably familiar with, and has at least at some point in some way decided that, actually, what you need to do that day could wait. We’ve all written something that was due that night just hours before the due date approached. As odd as it sounds for me, procrastination has always been a sort of motivator, whenever an assignment seems as though it would take a lot of effort and I didn’t feel up to the task, I knew that I could always do it later. But once later comes there is no choice but to sit down and get through the assignment. The stress of the deadline allows for a simple and undebatable motivation to do the work, because I can’t do it later. For this reason procrastination has always been in my tool set of strategies to complete work that can’t just be mindlessly trudged through.

    For me procrastination isn’t just a result of laziness and sloth, though that is sometimes a reason for holding off doing an assignment, it’s also a calculated way to make sure that an assignment is done in a way that ensures one state of mind while writing it. Oftentimes when writing an essay I’ll end up having to stop at some point and go do something, when I come back to the essay a day or two later my mind is in an entirely different place. The rest of the essay that I write comes out with a different tone, or a sudden wordshift, or I might even scrap the essay idea entirely, because I have no idea where I was even going with it. But if I force myself to sit down, say at 5:39 PM on a Thursday evening, and write a blog post due that night my mind’s not gonna shift around too much even if I take a small break to eat or grab or drink. This way I’m able to write my essay or do my assignment more as a stream thought with every idea naturally leading to another, even if I may forget to write some of them down.

    Procrastination also acts as somewhat of a triage mechanism to prioritize what assignments are supposed to be done in what order. What assignment have I been holding off the longest? What assignment is due tomorrow? By answering these questions, what work I should do that day, and what work I should be holding off to worry about another day. This system is simple, sure, but it works to allow me to focus more on the work I’m going to be doing today and not the assignment that I still have a whole week to do.

    However procrastination isn’t all sunshine and rainbows and it’s not something that should be used in all cases. Firstly for minor assignments it’s mostly pointless to procrastinate about them at all. Why wait a week to do something that’s done in 10 minutes? Procrastination also creates a whole lot of stress, partially by design, which not only can sometimes not be a pleasant experience, but can often result in a loss of productivity, as I spend 10 seconds pacing after writing a total of one sentence. Procrastination can, also partially design, not create the most well thought out choices in terms of what I do for the assignment in question. The removal of a second Dima’s opinion means that some choices that I make on the spot have the possibility of not being particularly well thought out, like admitting to procrastinating in an essay about that very topic. 

    Overall procrastination isn’t exactly a net positive with a small selection of advantages that can come into play with specific assignments. However procrastination isn’t an ultimate good either and using it, even in the “right” circumstance can have unintended consequences.