Ashleigh Heaton
Editor-in-Chief
It is two in the morning. You have an essay due the next day, and all you have managed to crank out is the introduction. You look at your dismally void Word document and sigh.
In the bottom corner of your screen, you see the Internet icon, smiling up at you. You stare at it, and it seems to whisper, “Just a quick update! In and out in two minutes, tops. I promise!”
You grapple with the thought. And then you click on the icon – what could it hurt?
You pull up Facebook, reading everyone statuses that read something to the effect of “This paper is awful, am I right? LOL”. On the news feed, you watch a video someone posted and remember another funny video you saw on YouTube recently. You pull up YouTube in a new tab, searching for the video, coming upon a few other videos along the way.
When you can’t find the video, you remember you saw it on StumbleUpon, so you click the Stumble button and Russian roulette through a slew of interesting and engrossing websites. You laugh at a random comic that pulls up, the noise cutting through the still quiet of your house.
The noise brings you back to reality. You glance at the time – it is now three in the morning, and your paper still only has an introduction.
Procrastination is a vicious cycle, one I am sure we have all been slaves to. It continuously makes us lose sleep and opportunities, always biting us in the butt. We know it isn’t good, and we know it is the real reason we lose sleep.
So why do we still do it?
To be fair, time management is not completely wired in the teenage brain – in our minds, we condense tasks and perceive that they won’t take as long as they do in reality. We don’t develop a solid, reasonable perception of time until we are around 20.
But the biggest and most important reason why we waste time is the fact that we have lost our will to fight it. The reason we procrastinate in the first place is to escape the not-so-fun stuff we have to do and replace it with things we want to do, be it the Internet, TV, video games or even friends we use as distractions. We want to have fun – why would we fight against that impulse?
And so your brain tells you, “Hey, this paper isn’t going to take that long. An hour or two, maybe. You’ve got time to piddle around – have fun! Enjoy your life!”
And of course, it isn’t until that panicked moment the night before, when you want so badly to fall asleep but can’t because you have the entire project to finish, that we realize what we have done.
Is there a solution? Maybe. I have seen people completely disconnect from the Internet, tossing social media to the side to help “cleanse” themselves. However, though it works for a while, almost every person I have seen do this has also had a major relapse, crawling back to Facebook and Twitter like a starving missionary.
The truth is, we can’t entertain the same luxuries we hold in such high value and not procrastinate. We can’t continue living the way we do, not giving up anything, and expect ourselves to suddenly become the masters of time management. It doesn’t work like that. School is a discipline. If we want to succeed, we have to give up some things we love.
In other words? Stop tweeting about how much work you have to do – just sit down and do it.
