IS SOMETHING BURNING?

BECAUSE I AM quite guilty of procrastinating, and have run into countless issues in the past because of that guilty habit, I figured I'd write about procrastination tonight. :)

So you might be a person who sets things onto your metaphorical back burner until the night before a deadline (or the morning of, in which case I admire both your spunk and your ability to get up early), or you might be the kind of person who immediately gets a project completed to lessen your stress load.

You I also admire.

Or you might be like me and be completely motivated to work on a project early on, but feel motivation wearing off about fifteen minutes later. Suddenly you realize that project you were going to get done a week early has now found itself simmering on your back burner along with all the other procrastinators out there.

The struggle, man. It’s real.

And sometimes we’re proud of our ability to continuously put things off and keep putting them off until we have no other choice but to get them done, because somehow we still end up doing a fantastic job on whatever it was we were assigned (or not… I guess some people half-ass assignments and receive grades that reflect their effort).

Some of us, however (like me), get away with procrastination most of the time. We luck out, and because of this we think there is no need to change our comfortable routine.

But is that routine actually comfortable?

I don’t know about you guys, but I would much rather float through life without an ounce of stress on my shoulders. And even though I know there is no such thing as a stress-less life, I most certainly do not need that stress to derive from the fact that it is minus twelve hours before a huge deadline and I have hardly even touched my work.

Yeah, no one needs that.

What’s funny is that we think about procrastination and immediately staple it to the concept of completing homework assignments (or I do, at least). But the fact of the matter is, deadlines are difficult to evade. Every occupation out there requires us to work and put forth effort, and nearly all these occupations contain deadlines of some sort. Considering the fact that this is a writing blog, I’m going to focus on writing related deadlines right now.

Every type of professional writing occupation (whether you want to be a journalist, critic, researcher, novelist, etc.) will demand that you meet deadlines, so why add the stress of cramming work in the night before to your already hectic life? Doesn’t seem worth it to me.

I say the sooner we conquer this bad habit, the sooner we realize it’s a lot nicer to be able to sit in bed the night before a deadline and watch five million episodes of your favorite TV show or read a book or even go out with friends. No more waving your arms and saying, “Nah, guys, I can’t go tonight. I have a revised copy of my manuscript due to my editor tomorrow and I still have five chapters to go through.”

Okay, so that was a bit over-dramatized, but you see my point.

So, if there is one thing I’ve learned, it is this: labeling yourself makes a difference.

If you say, “Yeah, I’m a huge procrastinator,” odds are you will continue to procrastinate. But if you tell yourself and others that you intend to get your work done early, chances are you might actually achieve that goal of yours. Now, will it work every time? Probably not, especially in the beginning. It’s a habit you have to establish for yourself, and habits take time to settle into your subconscious. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible to achieve.

So I suggest we all learn from our mistakes now and work toward procrastinating less before we regret something.

So while we're working on weekly resolutions, why not add some anti-procrastination habits to the list?

Lauren, out. *salutes*