BY JESSICA LANTHIER
Most graduates hope to drop certain habits after finishing their college and/or university careers. Wild partying, poor eating habits and those extra couple of pounds are among the most popular. However, contrary to the stereotype, if I could choose just one thing to rid myself of after graduating in April, it’s my love/hate relationship with procrastination.
If there’s one thing I can always count on before a big project or task needs completing, it’s my old familiar friend rearing its ugly head.
In many ways, I love putting off deadlines. I love that the brilliant ideas usually come to me when I’m under pressure. I love taking that time to do more enjoyable things such as watching old reruns of Friends, stalking people from my high school on Facebook and reading the latest gossip on TMZ.
What I have noticed, though, is that the things I love doing while I’m not doing what I’m supposed to, are completely mindless and unimportant. For some reason, I never use the wasted time wisely on other imperative tasks. This brings me to the hate part of the relationship.
Right before a deadline, I hit my panic mode. I’m always agitated, irritable and scrambling to finish my project and cursing myself for procrastinating yet again.
“Why do you do this to yourself?” I ask. “Next time, it will be different. This is the last time!” But it never is.
Some people claim that they need the pressure of a deadline to be able to do their best work, and maybe that’s true. But is it really worth all of the anxiety that comes along with it?
Procrastination is like that last slice of pizza sitting in the grease-soaked box. It’s available and enjoyable and we know how good it is to eat it and how delicious it tastes.
But we can also tell how full we are and know we probably won’t be able to move for a few hours if we scarf it down. We’ll regret it and definitely suffer the consequences of feeling nauseous for a while. We knowit would be a wise decision not to finish it until later.
But we always cave in.It’s the same routine with procrastination. When there’s an assignment, task or project deadline looming on the horizon, we carefully calculate precisely how much time we have to put it off. We know it’s a bad idea, but we also know how good it feels to indulge in our humdrum pastimes.
We need to figure out a way to combat our toxic love affair with procrastination because, really, what has it ever done for us?
We’ll talk about that tomorrow
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