Procrastination is my worst enemy. I’ve always been a victim of procrastination. Starting my assignments the night before it’s due is my speciality. It’s an extremely terrible tactic to get work done, but unfortunately it’s the only method I’m able to use to get my work finished in full swing. Sometimes I’ll even get a lucky hit and it’ll turn out half decent. Procrastination, anxiety, and distractions go hand in hand. For me, I get anxiety first looking at all the assignments I have to complete, then I start getting distracted, then procrastination hits. Look, it’s 1:40 in the morning and I’m writing a blog on procrastination.
According to Amy Spencer, she writes that we can blame biology for our procrastination. Your limbic system coexists and sometimes have conflict with your prefrontal cortex when trying to focus on a certain task or assignment. She describes that the limbic system always kicks in, where as the prefrontal cortex needs to be exercised and told to work, to actually start working. When you get lazy the limbic system overrides your determination and then you start getting distracted and boom! procrastination happens.
Procrastination is hard to overcome. Especially if you have disorder keeping you from focusing. This may cause people to take medication like Adderall to keep a person focused. Many college kids now a days take and sometimes abuse medication from procrastinating and actually getting their work done. That’s extremely risky. Are there other ways to keep people from procrastinating? Sure time management can help, but if you’re unorganized like me, it’s going to be extremely difficult to break a long habit that’s been ingrained into your brain for so long. Especially in college. Sometimes the stress pushes me to do the work I get assigned or else I would forget or get lazy to do it earlier.
According to Tim Urban, there’s an interesting concept that there are fake procrastinators and real procrastinators. A person to claims to be a procrastinator loves to give the real procrastinator a hard time for being a procrastinator. He also struggled with the college freedom and predetermined deadlines. If there’s a possible gap to push your work till, us real procrastinators will do it and stress ourselves out. Someone help us real procrastinators!
Picture Sources:
https://www.theodysseyonline.com/story-of-procrastination
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amol-sarva/why-you-love-to-procrasti_b_8494876.html
Freshmen year in English 15, a girl in my class wrote a paper about the positive aspects of procrastination. Basically, it discussed how it was a helpful motivator for the unmotivated which is especially true for me. I often cannot motivate myself to work on something if I know I can put it off till later. The risk is that I may not give myself enough time to complete it. But, as evidenced by the fact that this is like my 5th comment in the last ten minutes, it is a great motivator. Anyway, just something to consider.
I am literally the worst with managing my time. It seems as though I also work the best under pressure which is weird because I absolutely hate the stress. When I sit and try to do something ahead of time, I don’t take it as seriously (if that makes sense). Which may also explain why I’m commenting on posts at 3AM instead of resting up for a quiz i have in the morning. Here is a really interesting article exploring why people may feel their work is better done under pressure http://io9.gizmodo.com/why-do-we-work-better-under-pressure-1553149028 tell me what you think!
I love this post! It is so relatable, especially because I too sometimes struggle with procrastinating. It’s not always that I mean, sometimes I just get so busy I forget about deadlines, or think I have time to push things. Then the deadline hits and I am up late, and not producing the best work. I am working on this because, like you said, it is a bad habit, but I’m sure we are all guilty form time to time.
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/10-ways-improve-your-time-management-skills.html
Here is an article for all of you who are struggling. It gives you some helpful tips to managing your time! Good luck!