To be or not to be an Essay
To procrastinate or not to procrastinate? That is the question – at least when you are doing you have something important to do. But why do we procrastinate? Why do we spend so much of our precious time stressing over something that could be done in a matter of a few hours – maybe even less? All we would have to do was to pull ourselves together. Perhaps if we spent more time working and less procrastinating many of us would end up with a much better result, so why do people procrastinate?
To procrastinate seems like one of the most foolish things, and still it seems to be every teenager´s preferred thing to do – probably even everyone´s favourite thing to do. Personally, I have waited until the very last minute to even write the headline on this essay (and
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But it is proven that lots of procrastinators are also perfectionists. Therefore, the reason behind procrastination could be to avoid failing. As a perfectionist, you will think that only perfection would be good enough, and often you cannot live up to your own expectations, thus you just avoid trying – at least for as long as possible. You may even argue that you perform better under pressure, which I personally believe is a lie. But if you are a perfectionist then no matter how early you begin your assignment, you will always feel like it is not good enough, and you can do better. Because of this, you will be wondering how to make the assignment better, right until you reach the deadline of the assignment, and thinking about this constantly might make you stressed out. But if you wait up until the last minute to begin writing you will not have the time to wonder how to do better. Of course, you might still be stressed because of it, but therefore, as a perfectionist, procrastinating it might actually seem like a much better idea, rather than to begin early.
Procrastination has a lot to do with our daily habits and how we let our daily tasks overwhelm us. I used to be really bad at thinking all I need is twenty minutes to get ready and ill wait exactly till I have twenty minutes to leave. Suddenly that twenty minutes turned into thirty or forty minutes and then I became late.
The research article titled “Procrastination, Deadlines and Performance: Self-Control by Precomittment,” authored by psychologists Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch, aimed to figure out the reasoning behind procrastination. A study was conducted to answer three questions all posed from the central thesis of procrastination. The first question the studies sought to answer was whether people are willing to impose deadlines, with substantial consequences if they are not met, on themselves. The second question whether these self-imposed deadlines were actually helpful in improving overall performance. Lastly, the third question aimed to determine if the deadlines people imposed on themselves, were done so to achieve their best results. It was
Procrastination is a tendency to postpone, put off, delay, reschedule, take a rain check on, put on ice, hold off, or to defer what is necessary to reach a particular goal.(Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, Third Edition. Philip Lief Group 2009.) While attending College some students find it hard to juggle work, family, and friends. Leading most students down a dangerous path to procrastination; that negative impact affect students from their physical health, mental health, and social health.
Attention Getter: A famous author by the name of Wayne Dyer once said, “Procrastination is one of the most common and deadliest of diseases and its toll on success and happiness is incredibly heavy.”(1) In todays society it seems as if procrastination has become a normal and acceptable thing to do. It is often joked about amongst schoolmates and co-workers around the world. Nothing seems to get done until it absolutely needs to get done, then everyone runs around getting things done quickly and often times inaccurately. The trouble with this mentality however is that some things will never get done because something will come up tomorrow or the next day and what you are putting off now gets pushed even further back. Today I will persuade you to stop this habit from continuing. I will be explaining the problems we face when dealing with procrastination as well as how to deal with it and actions you can take to prevent it in the future.
Procrastination is not always a very bad thing though; there are some points in your life that it could prove to be a plus. If done enough you will be use to doing things last minute, which could possibly help you in your career with handling pressure when you boss tells you do something within a set amount of time. Also extended amounts of doing this bad habit could help you learn to take pressure better, as example when you have a huge paper due by the next morning and you need to keep your self calm or else it will show when your writing the paper. Even though these sound like positive measures to procrastinating they are really not worth the
Procrastination is a common tendency that we all give in to and all of us have at least a little experience with.
Have you ever had an essay due in three weeks and thought to yourself, “I’ve got time. I’ll just do it later”? Does staying up studying for an exam until 3 am in the morning sound familiar? How about running to class because you were working on a project until the very last second? If any of these unfortunate situations sound relatively familiar, you have endured the horrendous event of procrastination at some point of your jam-packed life. The one secret that nobody is enforcing on your young life is the extreme power of time management. In Chapter 5, the topics we address are as follows:
There is a certain irony with procrastination, things we put off doing accumulate to the point of in manageability and feelings of anxiety increase which, is why we procrastinate anyway.
Another factor that causes procrastination is fear. Fear is a very powerful emotion. Whenever someone is faced with a difficult task, they can become overran by the fear of not being able to complete it. People who succumb to this are setting themselves up for failure. Whenever someone feels as if they are going to fail, they tend to postpone the task for as long as possible. This means that they often try to avoid the task all together until completion is absolutely necessary. In doing so, the number of tasks that need to be done increases. However, the time required to complete them does not.
According to Semb, Glick and Spencer (1979), the level of procrastination increases as an individual stays longer in universities. It was stated by Ellis and Knaus (1977) that approximately, over 70% of college students engage in this activity. Undergraduates tend to start papers during the last minute; they fail to prioritize what should be accomplished first, and as a result, their academic performance is greatly affected. A detrimental effect on their studies leads to having poor grades and eventually, failure in class (Semb, et.al., 1979).
People procrastinate because they are afraid to fail, they have poor time management, they avoid things that seem difficult or they feel depressed or they feel guilty. Some people believe that other procrastinate out of laziness or lack of discipline, but I know there are perfectionists that often procrastinate as well. For example, a perfectionist may put off writing a paper until the night before it is due and then they will have an excuse saying, “I restarted because I didn’t like what I had written.”. Another example is that some philosophers and scientists, such that Aristotle questioned if time even exists, and Einstein believed that time was a muddle in which the past, present and future were only illusions.
In my study, laziness is the most common reason student procrastinate. Timothy A Pychyl, a professor who specializes in the study of procrastination says “procrastinators often remark that they lack the motivation necessary to act. They have an intention to act, but they fail to act in a timely fashion even though they recognize
Many people believe that procrastination is derived completely from laziness but the culprit could be multiple things, including perfectionism. This can become a huge problem for perfectionists, especially perfectionist students. They most likely will overthink projects and put off getting started because they’re afraid they won’t be able to make them as perfect as they want them to be. Luckily this is a common issue among students and there are many different techniques to cope with it. Students can overcome procrastination due to perfectionism by setting S.M.A.R.T goals, creating detailed to-do lists, and by just getting started.
Many of us can recognize that leaving things to the very last minute is not very wise and can cause an abundance of unnecessary stress. Procrastination is self-sabotage whether it’s to pay a credit card bill, fill up gas in your car, or complete your homework. Procrastination ranges from the most miniscule task to the most significant ones so the question is why do people procrastinate? For myself I rationalize this behavior by saying I work best under pressure but through my recent discoveries I found this isn’t true at all, it was just an excuse. The heavy pressure we feel when an important deadline is approaching physically forces us to complete our work but that doesn’t always mean that our work is good. Starting a project weeks before it is due guarantees that we had time to think and process your ideas therefore our work is our work is generally well-prepared. Starting an assignment the night before it’s due forces us to rush through it just to get it done it does not ensure that our best abilities are being put to use and usually ensures that our best abilities are being put to use and usually ensures that it’s satisfactory at its best from a psychological standpoint procrastinators can adapt
There are all always two types of students in this small world, first, the students that come ready to class with a three to five-page essay all proofread, nice and stapled with three transition sentences highlighted turned. Second, there are those students who come to class with not even half of a paper written out, unstapled, not a single transitional sentence highlighted and may have plenty of errors due to not proofreading the essay. Those second group of students are procrastinators, which are people who delay an assignment to do the task right before the deadline. Now, why do most of all 99.99% of school boys and girls procrastinate? Well, most people might have problems with lack of focus, or the person might be lazy and decide to