Find yourself doing everything last minute? Losing concentration due to the smallest of irrelevant things? Hello to you, my procrastination buddy…
Procrastination has always come naturally to me. I highly doubt that I have started and completed an assignment at least a week before it was due. Unfortunately, I only work well under stress and therefore, for absolutely no reason I will leave everything till the last minute. Then it’s a process of calculating how much time I have left, determining whether I should sleep for 2 hours or just stay awake, and regret not starting earlier. Every single time I stay awake stressing about whether I will get everything done on time, I convince myself that next time there will be no procrastination and I will do everything early. Of course this is yet to happen. Funnily enough I do get everything done on time, so I guess it does work for me. There are about a million things which enhance my procrastination…
I always love a clean, organised study area. For some reason when I am sitting down to do an assignment, cleanliness is an essential to getting my work done. Therefore, regardless of whether it is already clean, I spend a long-time deep cleaning my study table, study room, bedroom, bathroom, and why not the kitchen and living room as well. I feel like I have the attention span of a fruit fly to my assignments. There is always something more important than my studies although the due date is closing on me.
The kitchen is just around the corner from my studies, not just for cleaning but for the thrill of picking up snacks or making tea and coffee irrespective of whether I am hungry. Everything in the kitchen seems interesting. I don’t know whether I would consider it stress eating considering I don’t really stress until the last day. Eating is one of my happy distractions. It gives me great joy to scavenge through the cupboards locating the goods. We can’t function properly on an empty stomach, right?
10 minutes of study calls for a one-hour break. After attempting to study thoroughly for 10 minutes, I reward myself with a long break to avoid exhaustion. This means that within the span of 12 hours, I am studying for around 2 hours which seems amazing to my heart, but my brain knows it’s wrong. During my long breaks something which I often find myself doing is walking a million times around the study room or around the kitchen bench which allows my mind to float aimlessly. I find this grants me a feeling of calmness.
The most powerful of all temptations for me is the internet. I have attempted but failed on multiple occasions to place my phone as far away from me as possible. When I don’t have the phone within arm reach, I feel like I will miss an important call from someone. The calculator on the phone just seems to be quicker and I can search things up on the phone although I do my studies on the laptop. It feels empty when my phone is not next to me which is concerning. This in turn means that I am using up my allocated study time scrolling through social media or messaging friends.
It's as if the world is testing my concentration skills by having technological advances and allowing all my assignments and studies to be conducted on devices such as laptops. YouTube and social media apps are only a click away and there is an infinite number of answers available for my endless doubts and spontaneous questions. Of course, I am most curious when sitting down to study. I tend to search randomly, rewatch nostalgic movies and dramas, discover relatable YouTube channels, and honestly do everything but studying.
Dear procrastination buddy, just to confirm, at no point in this post am I promoting procrastination. I will do another post on methods I have tried to overcome procrastination because otherwise this post will get way too long.
P.S. I don’t know if studying can be considered as work. But I definitely consider it work (homework has the word ‘work’ in it…) and therefore in my work posts, I will post a lot about studies.
Written with sincerity,
Me.
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