P for Procrastination

The honeymoon period of university is officially over, marked by my handing in of my first assignment. I’m relaxed until I look at my calendar for the upcoming three days…weeks…months. I’m bombarded with tests, quizzes, assignments, and readings. The words “due date” appear in my nightmares as live, menacing creatures that I can’t run away from. In an ideal world, I get down to work, cracking open the books and draining my pens of ink. In reality, my actions resemble this more than anything:

When faced with a daunting list of things to do, my first instinct is to ignore its existence and watch Sons of Anarchy instead.

(Don’t even try to tell me you wouldn’t flush your academic career down the toilet for him. Liars.)

Unfortunately, that is possibly the worst way to deal with all of the things I have to get done. Procrastination is no longer just something that everybody does once in a while, it is a disease. It is a disease that infects everybody within a 10-foot radius of something even remotely amusing. I’m embarrassed to say I’ve been distracted by a blank wall before, purely because biology can get pretty boring at times.

The main problem with procrastination isn’t that things aren’t getting done. They are….eventually. The problem is that, by the time I’ve stopped messing around staring at Jax/my phone/my nails/the wall, it’s dark out and I can’t control my yawns. I’m exhausted and I can barely focus, which increases the time I need to do something, and eventually leads to less sleep. All of this, of course, building up to me behaving as a toddler.

Procrastination isn’t a new concept in my life, not even close. However, the effects are drastically different – they can be infinitely more disastrous than they have in the past. How to deal with procrastination you ask? I don’t know, I was going to ask you.Tomorrow though, I was going to ask tomorrow, because as Oscar Wilde said “I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do – the day after.” So maybe I’ll ask the day after tomorrow.