Home Guides Education & School
How do you fight procrastination, that habit of putting off until tomorrow what you should do today? I have three more days. This countdown to a deadline is something every average student knows. Whether it's handing in an assignment, calling someone back, renewing a subway pass, or starting to revise, there are many ways to do something else until the last minute.
"I never put off until tomorrow what I can do the day after tomorrow," said Oscar Wilde, and most students follow this maxim despite themselves. Procrastination is the master of our lives, and it leads us by the nose. We can find ourselves procrastinating in areas like goals, socializing, and making easy money in places like online pokies.
Let's first look at the causes we can find for this need to put off until tomorrow what we could do in a few minutes, giving us peace of mind and satisfaction for the work accomplished. Our brain is torn between what we want and our chronic lack of willpower. We would like to do many things: stop smoking, read classic books, see the must-see films of the French cinematographic heritage, eat a balanced diet, and do sports.
However, we know very well that we smoke without counting the calories, read mainly pulp fiction, watch the new American movies with delight, that our diet often takes the easy way out, and that our daily sporis reduced to going to the subway station. It's not for lack of wanting it, but life seems so long that we think we'll have a thousand times more time to do all these reasonable things later.
"Later" is the motto of every good procrastinator. We know that we should organize our studies logically to do well in school, but we always find ourselves cramming the night before an exam. Before we get started, some things seem much more important: redecorating our room, cleaning the house, calling friends we haven't heard from in ten years, spending an hour on Facebook to keep up with the social life of our network. In short, dispersion is often stronger than our beautiful resolutions.
Here are some tips to follow if you want to overcome this bad habit in which, we must admit, we often lose ourselves with pleasure, preferring the little stress of the last moment to a tidy and organized life but much too dull!
● Get away from distractions as much as possible rediscover the primary use of the university library.
● Make a list! You'll notice that once you get the hang of it, it's like a drug; you want to do it all the time. Making a "to-do list" (things to do) followed by a "done list" would be ideal (things done). It will be encouraging to see the first one fade and the second one thicken
● Think of the relief you'll feel after doing all those pesky things! Make a list (again!) of the exciting projects you can finally get into.
● Make it a point to start crossing things off the first list. This is the hardest part of getting started!
● But give yourself a little break from time to time to actively procrastinate, spend an hour on Facebook, watch an American series.
If despite this, you continue to put everything off until the next day, or even the day after that, the next week, or the next year, don't worry; everything will work out later.
And if by chance, you don't want to change your way of working, better yet, if you claim it, you can quote John Perry, professor of philosophy at Sanford University in the United States, who wrote an essay entitled Procrastination or the Art of putting off until tomorrow which can be found on different essay services.
According to him, procrastination is beneficial to man and is even productive! Indeed, the secondary tasks (sharpening pencils, washing tiles) performed to postpone the main functions (declaring taxes) find in the eyes of the particular procrastinator usefulness. Thus, he affirms that "by playing on the various levels of priority, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen who can even acquire a reputation of a workaholic." From slacker to a workaholic, only one step separates passive procrastination from "structured" procrastination.
