Procrastinate Personal Narrative

Soon, I discovered a method to avoid the potential of feeling insubstantial, if only for a few more hours or days. Thus, allow me to introduce you to an old friend, procrastination. My way of thinking soon became, “If I’m not going to get an A, then why even put the effort in?” and consequently, innumerable assignments were put off until five in the morning where it would be due in two hours or it would never reach my teacher’s hands at all. I’m sure most teachers believed the cause to be laziness or a lack of ambition, however I strongly believe that if they’d known the constant stress, self-doubt, and exhaustion that I

All my life I have been a lazy person, doing just enough to get by. Most of the time, in high school, I was content with just a “C”. The only time I wasn’t, was if it was a class I liked, and I paid attention to. If this was the case, I could have received a 99% on a test and been dissatisfied. But, for the rest of my classes, which were most of my classes, that I didn’t like, I never paid attention to or did homework, and I still managed to do well on tests. So basically I didn’t do anything except take tests and I still got satisfactory grades. In school I was so lazy that there could have been a project due worth about 20% of the final grade and I still wouldn’t do it.

My ordeal in middle school has made me assess myself as a person, and my technique of executing my duties as a student. I have learned that I have a very bad habit of procrastinating. In addition to my atrocious habits, it would be accurate to assume that I am an anxious person with ADHD, who, with self-control, can do my best work. It was

So staying to true form after facing the two big issues causing my procrastination I immediately began procrastinating my solving procrastination. However after two days I realized that this really was a problem that needed solving right here and now. So I began to brainstorm how I could solve my problem. The next week of the class couldn’t have come at a better time since we focused mainly on procrastination. After reviewing my notes from that class and looking to the textbook for advice, I found the solutions to my first problem to-do lists, calendars, timers, and specific study and work times with

I worked on assignments a little bit at time, and attempted to start them as soon as the module was unblocked.

Attention Getter: So I’m pretty sure everyone here has had an important assignment to complete before like a project or essay. And most of us usually plan it out where we do a portion of it every day. For example, something like this chart here. But then the next thing you know, the deadline is fast approaching and you still haven’t come close to completing your assignment. And we end up somewhere like this. Well, I believe that we can all relate to this and we have all done this to ourselves before. I’m talking about procrastination.

Over the last six weeks, I have enjoyed making progress on all of the goals that I have set myself. Most significantly, I have corrected the shape of my fourth finger through changes in my left-hand position and noticed dramatic difference in the ease and quality of playing. I found the changes I had to make difficult, and I committed considerable time to implementing slow and mindful practice. The most effective strategy in approaching this goal was practicing various finger patterns slowly and repetitively, noticing the look and feel of the correct technique. Over time I became more accustomed to the technique, and learnt to reproduce it in lesser time and with more consistency. I can confidently say that my technique is now improved after setting and striving for this goal.

Have you ever wondered how productive you were during the day? Well, I did. I wanted to know if I managed my whole day to be as productive as I should be. So, to if I was, I used the Time Management worksheet form wellcast.com to keep track and analyze for each hour for one day. As each hour passed for that day, I would record the things I have done in that time frame and slowly started to see the time wasters in my day that I was not being productive. When the day ended, I found out that I had five time wasters which I was surprised that they totaled in three hours of time spent on doing literally nothing. After seeing this, I decided to strategizes how to minimize the time wasters by doing actual productive college work and focus on techniques to make sure I do not miss upcoming events for my classes.

In working-out, there are no shortcuts so I stand there, sweat dripping down my face, the bar heavy with 135 pounds on my shoulders while my school’s strength coach encourages me, “come on, you got this”. I do it. I squat a set of 135 pounds for the first time!

It is seen as an essential part of learning and using what you learn in class. But when you get loads of class work and have very little time to finish it, then it becomes an unnecessary burden. Yet, sometimes, for me, it is the fact that I procrastinate that prevents me from completing a task. For college student, like myself who is working to pay for college, large amounts of class work usually brings lots of stress and fear of not being able to get good grades in many of my classes. Yet, I have support from my family, friends, and some peers who encourage me to put up a good fight in reaching my goal. I am a student that has gone through so much to get here, where I am. There were times that I had strong feelings that I would never be in college, just because of the negative energy I forced upon myself. Since pre-K, I have had this problem that if I can't do something I just give up, and stop trying. I still have this problem, but I have learned to get a control on it. The biggest problem was graduating from high school. I never thought that I would ever graduate. But I knew, as a student, I should at least try and show my teachers that I am putting effort. And now, I'm in college, studying pre-med, and hoping to become either a pediatrician, or a NFL Doctor.

A great deal of students don’t develop effective study habits and this ultimately results in feeling a decreased sense of self-esteem, stress, disorganisation, poor academic success, and a negative sense of self-efficacy which is linked to poor self-control (Pychyl & Dann, 2010). This is primarily caused by procrastinating. Procrastination is delaying an activity that possesses important benefits for us in the long-term but is voluntarily delayed in the short-term because of short-term impulsive temptations which offer greater immediate rewards (Steel, 2007). I chose to modify this problematic target behaviour because it was where I exercised poor self-control.

Well for starters throughout all of high school I have procrastinated and put everything off till last minute and sometimes not even do it. I would sit there knowing I have some huge project that needs done the next day and instead of doing it I would think of some way to try to get out of it or distract myself. I would distract myself by playing video games, go on a walk, sometimes just take a nap, or by talking to a friend

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:

Every student sets goals and deadlines to get their work done on time, but some wait until the last minute. As the grade level increases, the work load and difficulty increases, leading to more procrastination. Most students in high school procrastinate, and the question is, why? Is the work too hard? Do their teacher’s leniency cause them to? Do students not have enough time? Do extra-curricular activities take up too much of their time? There has been many other research studies on this topic, but I wanted to see if the students in my survey and interviews had any different correlations.

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