What role does procrastination play in your life?

  I stare blankly at the screen. The screen stares blankly back. My coding project is due in four days (“space it out over the two weeks of time you have to complete it!” my professor had warned). I have not started. My mind is empty. “Maybe tomorrow” I think to myself. I closed the app. I eventually finished the project a day before it was due, but not without serious groveling before even attempting it. 

    When I applied to Uni, I distinctly remember one of the essay questions asking us to rank which of three assignments we would complete if we only had time to complete two (I can’t remember the semantics of each assignment, but it was something along the lines of “Study for a biology test, complete a math worksheet, read a chapter of a novel for english”). I felt confident that my answer of “I would choose to complete the assignments in the classes I felt the least knowledgeable first. In my current classes, I feel blah blah blah” would wow the admissions committee. I don’t know whether it did, but here I am now. All this to say, I was never faced with procrastination as a younger student.

    Burnout hits hard and fast. During subbie year, my extracurricular productivity slowed to a crawl as I began to focus more and more on schoolwork. An event which I shall not name here transpired, and the seeming insurmountable circumstances of high school slowly dawned on me. Every day felt like a wade through mud as I tried to wrap my head around concepts taught through a screen. In-person instruction didn’t solve the problem, either. Months-long research projects loomed over me like sheer cliffs. I brought myself to sit in front of things I needed to do, yet I only accomplished the work I needed to complete in a deadline-induced panic. 

    Now, faced with the demoralizing and kafkaesque process of college applications, I feel less and less inspired to complete work early. Sure, the assignments begin to pile up and the to-do list seems to grow longer by the minute, but what’s the worth if I already have so much to do? 

    I do not procrastinate by choice. I hold out constant hope for a long enough weekend where I’ll finally be able to get everything done that I need to do (which always seems to be just longer than the weekends we’re given). But I also do not procrastinate without reason. There is a method to my madness.

    Imagine my brain to be a lemon, and an assignment to be making lemonade. Amateurs would leave their lemon in the fruit bowl and cut it open to juice when ready, but true lemonade enthusiasts understand the importance of freezing the lemon and then heating it up to break the cell walls holding in the lemon’s sour nectar before squeezing it, allowing the lemon to produce more juice. To freeze and thaw a lemon is to procrastinate on its eventual juicing, yet the same or even better result is produced. 

    Like the lemon, I must conjure up a great effort to wring my brain of ideas through a strange doom scrolling-inspired meditative state before I begin an assignment. I must wait for motivation to strike before I can truly attempt my work. Because motivation produces results, not forceful half-hearted engagement. 

    I would hate for the “moral” of this essay to be that procrastination is a good thing, which it certainly is not, but we’re headed towards the gray area. I believe, while initially counterproductive, procrastination also produces results for me, which I think is an important distinction to make. Procrastination is not necessarily a detractor of the quality of my work, but a means to an end. While it isn’t the best study habit, it is also inescapable, and must be learned to live with instead of fought.

-William King