The bell rings, it’s 4:18pm.
Students rush out the door, walk fastly through the halls, and eventually leave the school. Bundled with a bunch of schoolwork in his hands, the student arrives home and thinks about it.
“You got a project, 3 quizzes and homework all due by the end of the month”. He says in his head.
A common response to that thought is to just forget it and leave it. I mean he’s still got a couple of weeks, what’s there to worry about? Few days later, a week before the due date, the thought of using so much energy and time just sounds so tiring, he worries instead of working. Calming himself with the words of;
“I got the whole weekend to work on it”
The weekend rolls, but the thought of just working on it hours before the next month comes to mind and so he sticks to the plan. He crammed his work all at once. Studying, working, rushing and panicking occurs.
This is common among most high schoolers’ routines. This is an example of procrastinating.
Having the habit of procrastinating is common these days. Procrastinating is prioritizing the things you’d rather do in the moment and delaying important work. As students, we receive a lot of things to do. Taking notes, studying for a test and working on projects are a few examples. Some levels of class may vary yet all give us loads of work.
All classes have something in common, and that’s giving students a deadline. We receive the deadline, hours, days or even weeks before. Usually in a procrastinator’s mind, they have the same mindset as the given example, they eventually reflect about the time they wasted. Freshman Emaan Khan shares her relatable experience; “I procrastinate all the time. If I’m procrastinating something where I need to do it urgently, and I just can’t get myself to do it, it’s not fun at all.” Once the work gets hand out, students tend to plan when they should actually put the work in. But something different for procrastinators is that when the time comes, the motivation to do unnecessary stuff takes over minds such as the sudden urge to clean a whole room, take a nap or even use the time to scroll their lives in social media.
This all leads to the habit of cramming, the waste of time will be poured during the last minute and that’s usually when the motivation kicks in. The motivation of everything overlapping in our minds as it all sinks in. But this isn’t always a negative thing to see, “It can affect people differently, some people see it as a problem, others see it as their creative process. I wait till the due date because that’s when I work off adrenaline.” A freshman student Gabby Shamieh expressed. Shamieh continued by saying “It affects me in a good way.” In others perspectives, they don’t quite have much motivation to actually get the work done and this is the way to help them. It’s all about perspectives.
There are 2 types of procrastinating in general that doesn’t just involve school, one with a deadline and one without. Examples without a deadline are simple things such as washing the dishes, doing laundry, or any basic things you can do around the house. It’s something we observe people do around us, or even you yourself do at home. Some days we think that we can just do our chores after one more episode in netflix.With that thought, everyone procrastinates. But specifically students can reach a level of procrastination that can affect them academically or even mentally. We can tame the level of procrastination we do. Having a bad habit of procrastination this early without taking action on minimizing it can go throughout your adult life and affect your actions massively by presenting yourself unprepared and uncommitted.
Procrastination isn’t always a short-term problem that can all be crammed in a few hours, in some cases it may be long-term. All students have different perspectives on procrastination, it’s all about the mindset and how you tame it. Society sees it as a problem when in reality it’s a characteristic of human nature, we all have this habit. Eventually, everyone has times where they lack motivation and procrastination is the result.
