When you postpone things to such a degree that it influences your own life or that of others, it is called procrastination. A concept not wholly unfamiliar to columnist Paula Dubbink.
It’s twenty past midnight and I have had a long day at work. I would like to be in bed. Reality is that I’m sitting down to write a column about procrastination. The deadline was…at least a week ago. Auch.
I learned the word procrastination somewhere in my second week of university and it turned out to be a very valuable addition to my vocabulary. At my US-style college, where deadlines were real deadlines and no exams could be retaken, academic pressure was high.
As such, the student population could be divided in two groups: people with a high dose of discipline, who easily planned to go a party the night before a big paper deadline as they were “already done” and people with a little less disciple, who sure as hell would be working on the paper until 23.59, even if the teacher was mean and set the deadline on a Sunday night.
I belonged to the second group of people – like most students, it seemed. In exam week, the study area closed at 1 AM and there were people that had to be kicked out. The concept “pulling an all-nighter” was common knowledge.
Procrastinating had an ambivalent status: on the one hand, one felt ashamed for not having been disciplined enough to do take care of things right in time. On the other hand, it could also give some status: “Look, I started on this essay only the night before – and I still finished it and I even got an A-!”
During my master program, deadlines and me became better friends.
Then came my master thesis.
In December last year (thesis: half a year overdue, length under 10 pages; me: quite desperate) I accidentally ended up in the “Night Against Procrastination” at Eden, organized by the Academic Support Centre. A lecture there taught me some essential points about procrastination.
One: procrastinators aren’t necessarily lazy. While delaying the things that they really should be doing, they might be working on other, very useful, activities. Usually, these activities will have a shorter reward period: to clean your room gives a good feeling directly, while writing the first page of a paper means…that you’re still far from done.
Two: almost everyone delays certain things – it’s natural. But while it doesn’t become a real problem for everyone, a substantial amount of students (twenty to forty percent according to studies) seems to struggle “sincerely” with procrastination.
Three: procrastination can be overcome, for example by setting realistic deadlines, dividing the task in clear subtasks, rewarding yourself when a task is done and some more strategies that might sound like open doors to many. But anyways, they work, I can tell from experience – my thesis got done eventually.
So, all good now? Nope. I still made my editor wait way too long for this column. Casper, I’m sorry…
