Being a high school student, it’s not ground-breaking news that I procrastinate. Procrastination has long been demonised as the killer of productivity, the cardinal sin of workers, and basically, an all-round bad guy.
However, consider this, despite the fact that I openly own up to procrastination, I still manage to get work done. Some argue that by procrastination we place ourselves under unnecessary stress, and that perhaps it is better to work on everything a little at a time, distributing tasks.
But I argue that, if done right, procrastination actually aids productivity. Most times, when one thinks about being productive, we think about distributing our work over the time that we have, for example, perhaps working 15 minutes each night on an essay for five nights. But, what if, one night, you sit down to write a part of the essay, and nothing flows? Should you keep going just to complete those 15 minutes? What if on the first day, you wrote 500 words, but on the second day, you wrote a mere 50. Are we really being efficiently productive here? Yes, we are still getting the essay done, but had we waited and written the entire essay when we felt inspired, maybe we could have gotten it done in less time. Here is where procrastination can help efficiency.
Another strategy I like to employ is procrastinating from work, by doing other work. Usually, in our minds, we prioritise our tasks. We know which task is of most importance, and should be completed as soon as possible, but we might not be in the mood to do it. Rather than go against our own will and force ourselves to complete it, why not do a less important task in the mean time? As a student, that translates into putting off doing a hard Mathematics worksheet, due to a headache, but doing some light reading instead. Had I tried to do the Maths problems with my headache, I would have taken far longer than I ordinarily would have. So, even though I understood that the problems were of more importance, I also understood that it didn’t make sense to force myself to do something I wasn’t in the mood to do.
Obviously, this is not an excuse to ignore deadlines; it’s just providing a means of getting to the deadlines using less work. Chances are if you don’t feel like doing something, you won’t do it well. Don’t feel guilty about procrastination, just do it right.
