Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Procrastination, Thy Name is...

I'm a college kid.

Therefore, I'm a professional procrastinator.

You can give me work, a job.  I may hate it, but I'll still follow a worthy time-management schedule for productivity's sake.  If I love it, there will be even less chance of my path diverting.

Give me school-related tasks...homework, studying, group projects, assigned reading...and I will do anything, ANYTHING, to avoid doing it as long as possible.

Good example:

I had a paper due on Monday.
I intended to get back to school on Sunday to work on it from 7 or so, up until it was finished.  I didn't anticipate it going beyond a few hours worth of work.

What did I do instead?

  1. I updated my resume.
  2. I updated my LinkedIn profile.
  3. I took a phonecall from my boyfriend.
  4. I got locked out of my dorm room, while my roommate slept inside...she sleeps like the dead.  It took an hour or so to wake her up and get back inside.
  5. I chatted with a friend on Facebook.
  6. I worked more on my LinkedIn profile.
  7. I "reread" the material that the paper was on.
  8. I found excuses to take more notes to "prepare" for the paper.
Then, when all other options were exhausted...I wrote.

It took a short period of time, once I actually wrangled my focus and ran out of other things to do.

I think this is a fairly natural occurrence to most members of the college-aged population; even respectable, hard-working, punctual students find a million and one different things to do other than their homework.

There's no real lesson to this post, just some musing over a phenomena that has no true explanation.  With that in mind, I should go to homework...after I clean my dorm room, sit on Facebook for four hours, chat with someone on the phone, run to the store, hit the drive-through, watch Glee, and...well, you get the idea.

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