by Trisha Fitzgerald, SUNY Cortland
Posted in on Thursday, Dec 28
It’s the one thing the majority of college students have in common. Procrastination really starts in high school and, depending on the person,it either gets better or worse when they go on to college. For some people it works:
they can actually pull it off and work better under pressure. However, others may not have that advantage. They might become too nervous and break down or they might just be too lazy and not care. It works differently for every person, and every person can avoid it, but my experience is that that rarely happens.
The assignment is handed out five weeks before it’s actually due. You think to yourself, oh that is plenty of time. And it is, so you think, yeah…I’ll get to it later this week and get a good start to it. Well, you had friends come visit from out of town, and the movie you wanted to see came out that weekend. There goes your first week, but the paper is still on your mind. You plan a day ahead and picture yourself getting to work on it tomorrow. Tomorrow comes, but it just didn’t end up happening. Unnecessary things got in the way. So, again you picture yourself getting the work done for the next day. This cycle goes on until your five weeks are up. All of a sudden, it’s the night before your paper is due and you have nothing.
You realize that this is it. No more time to waste, and you’re really wishing you had something already started because this is a pain to have so much to do in one night. Finally, you start getting this done. The length has to be eight pages at least and you’re on the third, unable to move on because you are stuck and no words are forming in your head. While struggling over what to say next, you realize that your keyboard is long overdue for a cleaning. So you take care of that. The spacer is still blinking on the third page and nothing is coming to you. Meanwhile, your roommate comes in and has a half-hour story to tell you which you are more than willing to listen to because anything is better than staring at the computer screen. At the end of their story, your roommate always want to know what you think and any advice you have. After that, clearly you have to go over the pros and cons and weigh the options. That took about an hour to hour-and-a-half out of your paper writing.
Now, you are back at it again. This time you are thinking if you hadn’t just wasted an hour-and-a-half talking, you probably would be close to done by now. Some words finally come to you and you're writing again. It’s going by slowly, but you are down to one page left. You love the feeling of only having one page left, so you figure you need to celebrate that and get online and tell all your friends. Well, that wasn’t your brightest idea because now it’s another hour later. You couldn’t pull yourself away from your best friend telling one of the funniest stories you have ever heard and then somehow got into a conversation about work, internships, and where you’ll be after that.
The last page has now become the last paragraph. To make your paper all come together you need to think of “at least” five brilliant sentences that make your paper seem right, and puts that final touch on it. Obviously this takes you another thirty minutes. That last paragraph is finally done, and you have that huge weight lifted off you shoulders and you can actually breathe. You're breathing like you haven’t been able to in weeks. You are free, to do what you have been doing those past five weeks, but this time without that paper in your head every few minutes.
Procrastination is definitely something that can be prevented. People can start their work ahead of time, work on it little by little so that not much is left the day before it's due. That would be the smart thing to do, but how many people will actually admit that they will do that next time? Guarantee that even after you read this and think, I should be smart next time and get it done, you already know you won’t. It’s not a bad thing, it might not be a great thing, but it somehow works.
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