Procrastination

          Have you ever found yourself in a situation similar to this? Imagine you are assigned a project, one that determines your class grade. You are told about the assignment by your teacher 2 months before it is due. “Two months? I got lots of time!”, you think to yourself. About 2 weeks later your teacher mentions it again, “Plenty of time still.”, you think to yourself. Another week passes, then two more, and two more, and suddenly you’ve left yourself a week to finish a project that was designed to be finished over the course of two months. You begin to panic and stress yourself out about completing it. One week of long days of work with almost sleepless nights and you’re finally done, the night before it’s due. Once you get your grade back you are crushed to find out you failed. You think to yourself ”What would have happened if I had taken my time?”

           If you have ever been in a situation like that or anything similar, you know that waiting to complete an assignment ultimately will kill you in the end. So why do we do this? Maybe it’s the temptation of entertaining ourselves in another way or maybe we’re just lazy. Whatever the reason I always think what if I didn’t wait? How much better would I have done on this? I always say this after I wait to do homework and that I won’t do it again, but then I find myself in the exact same situation a day later. It’s bad habits like these that are the hardest to shake off. We will never be able to fully eliminate these “monsters” from our lives at once, so we have to slowly change our ways of doing things. 

            One thing I do to keep myself on schedule is that I eliminate all distractions from my life that keep me from working; things such as turning off my phone or isolating myself in my room, help me gather myself and do my best work. Another thing I have used is a schedule or a planner. This can be as simple as a scribble on a sticky-note, or using an actual planner/ assignment notebook. Sometimes just writing stuff down isn’t enough so do your best to keep these things insight so they stay on your mind. One of the best and stress-free ways of completing a long assignment is to do it little by little. Don’t overload yourself with all of the work at once. It is better for you and your grade to work little by little and to take breaks. This will keep you from burning out and it will improve the quality of your work. 

           So my best advice for you, reader, is to use these strategies or any others you can think of to change your method of working. Soon after you begin to implement these methods of work into your life you will notice a change in your stress levels and an improvement in the quality of your work. Remember that we cannot let these monsters control our lives, only we can control our lives.