Procrastination--Eric

 

Procrastination, it's a universal phenomenon. It affects almost all of us in virtually every walk of
life. It is like that mutinous houseguest who shows up uninvited and overstays their welcome; it
seemingly never goes away. It's the reason why your schedule piles up and the reason why your trash bin
right now is full - hopefully not, but if it is, it's most likely because of procrastination. Fittingly, I'm
working on this essay a very timely week late due to procrastination. I should be sleeping but my
procrastination keeps me up every night. Procrastinating is something I, as a student living in a modern
world, do far too much. My adeptness at procrastination is the root of my perpetual stress and horrific
sleep schedule. Consciously though, I’m acutely mindful of just how much self-harm procrastination does
to me, yet I continue everyday to be shackled by it, and even accept it as a part of myself. As I've grown
up however, I have started to fight back against my subconscious which pushes me towards
procrastination.

The Oxford English Dictionary would tell you that procrastination is: “The action or habit of
postponing or putting something off”. Although accurate, this definition to me doesn't do justice at
explaining the consequence that procrastination ensues. A single sentence definition can’t explain that
procrastination feels like you’re in suffocating debt or that you're slowly drowning and can't swim back
up for air faster than you're sinking. However, we still all know procrastination to feel like this at times
even without a dictionary even having to tell us. Procrastination is a shared phenomenom. It’s the shared
experience with this phenomenon that makes many of us feel so falsely justified at times. For myself this
fallacious feeling of justification is what prevents me from breaking the cycle of procrastination and
escaping from its grasp over my life. From my own personal experience, procrastination most accurately
can be described as a snowball falling down a mountain, growing bigger and more daunting the longer it
remains in motion.

Procrastination has become very normalized for students like myself that I often find myself
sharing a laugh with friends over self-deprecating jokes involving the behavior as if it isn't something
serious. Opportunities are lost and even families can be destroyed because of procrastination. For a
myriad of other reasons, it shouldn't be so easy to joke about this destructive habit, yet the normalization
of procrastinative behavior makes it so. At the root of this growing normalization is technology. Everyday
it is becoming easier to procrastinate. Our increasing accessibility to free entertainment and distractions
caused by the internet is having us live in a time of professional procrastinators such as myself. This
notion I am raising up isn't just conjecture. It's rooted in studies that exposure to technology and
procrastination go hand in hand. A study done by Amasya University of highschool and middle school
students found that, “adolescents' media and technology use cause academic procrastination behaviour to
adversely affect their academic achievement”. Although we face the ever growing challenge of being
exposed to distractions, we still have the ability to mitigate how much we let them succumb us to
procrastination.

Overcoming procrastination requires a conscious effort to understand and address its root causes.
There can be several psychological reasons for why someone subconsciously chooses to procrastinate. It
is on us to narrow down what is the root for our own individual cause of procrastinating. To rehash,
procrastination is the feeling of being entrapped. However, it is each and every one of us that harnesses
the power to break free from the prison of the bad habit, so long as we recognize that we have the key.
Fittingly, we should not waste time and begin our search today. As Charles Dickens once said, “never do
tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time”.

Sources:

https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1317861

https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=procrastination