Procrastination At Its Finest

by Nicole Lee Poh Sim, Sophomore 2 Cempaka, Class of 2015

pro·cras·ti·nate verb \prə-ˈkras-tə-ˌnāt, prō-\

: to be slow or late about doing something that should be done : to delay doing something until a later time because you do not want to do it, because you are lazy, etcetera.

As the days slip by and we no longer find ourselves in need to to wake up early, I find that my procrastination level has never been at its highest. I really didn’t know what to write about, and as it’s the holiday season, I think it’s safe to say that my brain is half-asleep most of the time. Then it struck me. I thought to myself, “Why not write about procrastination?” Hence this very article you’re reading right now - which has been long overdue. If it hadn’t been for my friends who constantly bug me to write another article or to help me think of what to write, I would probably still be stuck at the first line. 

I would think that most of you can probably relate to procrastination, in fact, it may even be your best (or worse) friend. I’m sure there have been instances when you’ve thought to yourself, “I’ll do it in five minutes.” or “I’ve got so much time left, I’ll do it later.” This will go on for a while and you will keep telling yourself the same thing over and over again, until you’ve got less than an hour left to complete your task. Then, things start getting messy. You start panicking. You start freaking out. You do everything in a rush. And in the end, you make very little progress and may be dissatisfied with what you have done.

I consider myself to be a champion at procrastination. I can just sit for hours, literally, and do nothing but stare into empty space. Now, why do we procrastinate? I’ve thought long and hard (well, not really) about the answer to that question and have come up with an answer. This is just my opinion on it and I may not be a hundred percent right on it. There are two parts to my ‘theory’.

Firstly, most of us think we have a lot of time on our hands when we actually don’t. A good example would be us teenagers when trying to complete our everyday school homework. It doesn’t really matter when the due date is  - we normally just cram everything up and wait till the last minute (correct me if I’m wrong, but I highly doubt so) to finish our homework. Every time we're poised to pick up the pen and start on that two-page long essay, we suddenly remember that there's a can't-miss football match on tonight, or that we haven't checked Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/any other form of social media in a while. 

If we’re lucky enough, we get our homework done by midnight or maybe two in the morning or worse come to worse, on the bus the next morning. For the rest, well let’s just say it’s a matter of filling in the blank spaces with whatever answers come to our head whether right or wrong, right before the class starts. Worse comes to worst, some of us just scribble whatever nonsense that comes to our head just before the teacher comes to our desk to collect our homework. When we get into trouble for not producing ‘good quality’ work, we sort of learn our lesson. We finish our homework on time once or twice, and the bad habit of procrastination starts kicking in again. 

The second and final part to my ‘theory’ of procrastination is laziness. When laziness sets in, there will be many excuses to why a piece of work cannot be done or should not be done. It’s usually very difficult to overcome laziness unless one has very strong will power. An example of laziness is when your brain is just unable to think anymore and however hard you push your brain to work, it refuses to budge. It has a thousand and one excuses to why it can’t budge, but you know it’s just in the lazy mode. 

As I’ve said earlier, most of us procrastinate. Is it alright to procrastinate? Probably during school-days, it's not such a good idea. However now that the holidays are in full swing, why not? You've earned a break anyway, and as the procrastinator's most favourite saying goes, there's always tomorrow.