I have been a procrastinator for as long as I can remember, I would always wait until the very last minute to start assignments when I have had the whole day or even week to complete it, I clearly love the feeling of being stressed out.
Time after time I tell myself next time it’s going to be different, next time I’m going to start 
my assignment the day I get it! Until next time comes and I’m in my bed wrapped up in my blanket with no work done telling myself that it’s not a problem because I have tomorrow, I have time, until tomorrow comes and surprise, surprise nothing happens. This goes on until it’s the night of submission and I’m panicking trying to get the work done with only hours to spare.
I’m typing frazzled, with my heart feeling like it’s going to beat out of my chest, my eyes are darting to the clock every 20 seconds to make sure it’s not 12 o’clock yet, I start to get a cold sweat because I’m so afraid of missing that deadline so I keep typing away on the keyboard so hard and fast that I’m afraid it’s going to break. This is my worst habit, it has literally become a part of my school routine and I hate it so much.
I’ll give you some insight to my procrastination so you can so you can see how serious it was. My first year of college was the hardest time I have ever had at school; I had this class called Introduction to Journalism and every Sunday we would have to submit a research paper to a website called Trident Learning, now the funny part about this website is that its designed so that it shows you how much time you have left to submit the assignment and after that time’s up the submission box closes and you can no longer submit.
Now as you could imagine for a procrastinator like myself that was my worst nightmare, but it was also the best thing for me because it helped my procrastination. I was still only starting assignments on the day they were due but I always finished with time to spare and to me that was really all that mattered, even though I was struggling through my research papers every weekend. I say struggling because my tutor loves politics and every paper was something political that I had to really do a deep search on the internet for, now let’s get to the research paper that almost killed me because of the stress that I put myself through.
This research paper was about The Marijuana Decriminalization and Legalization Debate in Barbados.
Now it shouldn’t have been a hard paper to write because marijuana debates are always happening in Barbados, but because I have poor time management it was, as I said I always started my research papers on the day that they were due but for this one I shouldn’t have, this was on the day that my family had decided they wanted to take part in the Breast Cancer Awareness walk, I had never done it before so when my mom told me about it I jumped at the opportunity to go. I really should have done this paper days ago but as per usual I told myself that it would be fine and I had time.
Now you’d think that any logical person would’ve taken the time in the morning to do the paper but no, being the smart person that I am, decided that I would start at 12:00 p.m. when I had to leave home at 3:00 p.m., does that sound like a smart person?
I probably had around 200 words and I told myself I had time left to do the assignment so I left home. I was at the walk having a merry time until I realized the sun was starting to set a bit and we were nowhere near to being finished, that’s when the realization that I still had to go home and do some research really hit me, so of course the panic started to kick in, along with all the thoughts racing through my mind of all the work had to do.
This kicked me into high-gear; we were by Queen’s College and I live in Warrens. I started to cut through people, zigzagging, making sharp turns, bobbing and weaving through the crowd and doing literally anything I could to go home as fast as I could because I knew I had to get home to finish this paper and nothing was going to stop me. I kept this up until I got to Simpsons Motors on the highway and I was TIRED. My chest was rising and falling quickly as I took deep breaths because my lungs were on fire, my chest was so tight and the burning in my lungs threatened to make my pass out, my legs were burning and stinging as my blood rushed through them and the only thing I could do to alleviate some of this pain was to hold over and brace my hands on my knees to try to catch my breath.
I could’ve passed out then and there so I used that time to wait for my family to catch up to me, which they did in about 10 minutes. When they caught up I tried to pace myself but all my energy was still gone, but I still powered down the highway like the Champion I was and ended at Massy like everyone else.
Me ending like a champion
After that took about 10 minutes or so to get home because my family decided to take the long way home. When we got there I was dead tired, my legs were threatening to give out, too weak to carry my weight any longer and my eyes were drooping so badly that I nearly passed out when I walked through the door my energy was depleted and with every movement I made, it felt like my body was made of lead, tired was an understatement of how I felt and all I wanted to do was take a shower and sleep.
I checked the time when I eventually dragged myself to the computer, it said that it was after 5:00 p.m., I only had 200 words when I was supposed to have 1000 and the paper was due at 11:55 p.m. so I was clearly panicking. I got up went in the bath, showered quickly, dressed, sat my computer, started researching any and everything I could find and dropping it in the Word document, I was so tired but I could not stop for a second or I would’ve fallen straight to sleep.
I finished the paper at around 10:30, so it took me five hours to finish the paper while I was running fumes. That’s what I did to myself but if I had sat down earlier to finish the paper all of that could’ve been avoided.
What is procrastination?
“Diamonds are made under pressure”
In my class we have a saying for when we procrastinate, “diamonds are made under pressure” and every time we say that it justifies our procrastination.
When I asked a friend of mine what procrastination meant to him and he said “when a person makes their own excuse to not execute a time sensitive task, and in some situations purposely ignoring the urgency of such tasks without any justifiable reason.”
For me my procrastination comes from two places, I’ll discuss the first place now and we’ll get to the second a bit later, exhaustion. I work on the weekends as a waitress at a restaurant which requires a lot of physical activity, I’m constantly on the go taking food orders to the customers, collecting the food to the kitchen, wrapping cutlery, cleaning tables and so on. Juggling school, work and assignments isn’t easy for me, some days I get home from school and all I want to do is sleep my life away but I know I can’t because I have assignments to do, and of top of that my social life is practically nonexistent because the day that I’m home, Friday, my friends are at school.
When I get home from a long day of work the last thing I want to do is look in a book, look at a laptop or anything that isn’t my bed so that leaves a lot of work unfinished.
In my mind I have the world of time, deadlines don’t exist and assignments are always done, even if I haven’t put in any work, that’s what happens in my perfect world. But that’s not how it works even though I wish it was.
When I procrastinate I feel like I have the weight of the world on my shoulders, the clock starts ticking, the deadlines are getting closer and closer but I just can’t get my phone out of my hand to sit at the computer and focus, I keep saying I have time. My heart starts to race as the minutes go by , I think about the work that I have to get up and do, my mind is fills with worry and guilt as I think of the bad grade I’ll get from the assignment being turned in late and the disappointment my family will feel when I fail which would lead to me spiraling down a dark hole of sadness which would cause me to fail all my other assignments then I’ll fail the whole course, this is how my mind work, yet here I am again panicked and rushing to get the work done at the last minute.
When I spoke to licensed psychologist JaDon Knight, he defined procrastination as “delaying the goal of something we’re supposed to be achieving” and there are a multitude of reasons that we can do this but I’m going to be focusing of fear of failure and with that comes anxiety, I am an anxious person, I overthink every aspect of my life and constantly think the worst, so right now fear of failure is very prevalent in my life.
Fear of failure is exactly what it says, you are afraid to fail so you end up doing nothing, “you can kind of paralyze yourself into doing nothing” JaDon said, and that this affects perfectionists the most because they want everything to be perfect so badly and when that doesn’t happen they just give up or in my case do nothing and I believe that, because as of right now I have been paralyzing myself into doing nothing with my Video Productions class, there’s so much work to do. We have research a topic we want to do our documentary on, then research people to interview for the documentary, make calls to set up interviews, record the interviews, edit a script after we complete the interviews, go over the script with our tutor then re-edit the script and finally pull together the video for submission which is not easy and it takes a lot of time and involves staring at a computer screen for hours which gives me a headache because its hurts my eyes.
It’s a big workload to juggle and every time I think about it I end up doing nothing, because I’m afraid that if I actually put in effort to this project and just fail that it would all be for nothing. I would end up feeling dejected, like I did all this work to just fail or not get the grade that I thought I deserved.
It turns out I’m not the only person that feels like this Christopher Codrington who just came back home from studying abroad described feeling this feeling when he was in Secondary school and he wanted to apply for a scholarship, he said that he was working on it with his teacher but on his own he did nothing, he said that he kept making excuses to not write the essay, saying that he didn’t have all the required documents to apply, although he had two months to do it, he procrastinated on it all the way until the due date had passed and that in retrospect he was afraid that he wouldn’t have gotten through with the scholarship.
Fear of failure is a real thing that stops us from being as great as we could be so how can we stop it.
How do we stop it?
In the words of one of my classmates Pierre “it’s all a mind thing.” It’s all mental, but if procrastination is so mental why is it so hard to stop it?
If I could sit down for at least three hours straight, a day, and focus on my assignments I could be so much better in school, my grades would skyrocket, anxiety would be a thing of the past and I would feel so much better about myself. My stress levels would definitely go down and I wouldn’t see school as an institution that’s just here to stress me out. On every assignment I’m given I procrastinate without fail and I feel like I could have done better work and gotten a better grade.
If we wanted to stop we could, but unfortunately it’s not as easy as to just say “if you want to stop procrastinating just stop.”
It’s not that easy, but JaDon told me “one way to stop is to not run from imperfection, instead to focus on finishing the task instead of finishing perfectly.” Don’t focus on all the internal thoughts telling you that you can’t do it and it won’t come out how you want it to but say that you know what you’re doing, pace yourself, don’t rush and let the work flow and don’t say that you have time because you don’t, you never do because something unexpected will always happen and then you start to panic and won’t do the work as well as you want to.
For me my way of doing work was to totally isolate myself from everything when I want to focus on work, I know that I’m semi-addicted to my phone like most teenagers in this day and age, so I turn of my phone, the television, tell my family not to talk to me, bring water and all my notes close to me and just tell myself, okay if you can write 150 words in 10 minutes then you can have a break. But funny thing is I always end up back on my phone so then I end up in my cycle all over again.
But this weekend I tried the method JaDon told me about and, I blocked out the voice saying that I have time and blocked out the voice saying that I would fail and I sat down at my computer and I did what I was supposed to do. We had a case study on Venezuela due at 11:55 p.m. but this time I wasn’t as anxious I wasn’t as stressed I focused and I said I know what I have to do, although the information was hard to understand I tried to break it down in my own words and I got it done.
That’s how for the first time I properly beat procrastination.
History and mass communication 