Procrastination and College Students Essay

Procrastination and putting things off can have many consequences in your life. I know this because I am always waiting until the last minute to do anything whether it is getting ready for work or getting my homework done. Although you can still get your work done on time, procrastinating can drastically impact a student’s life by leading to decreased grades, an increase in stress, and a lack of responsibility ultimately reducing the student’s chances for success.

I myself have been guilty of procrastinating on a daily basis. Seniors still want to make solid grades depite their lack of motivation to get them. As a result of putting off studying, students often cheat to maintain decent grades. Furthermore, some of them wait until the night before the test to cram in study time. Because of the desire for money and freedom, many upperclassmen spend their time working instead of completing homework assignments. A year of procrastination and negating responsibilities can turn into bad habits that follow some students for years to

As a mentor who has struggled with finding academic motivation, I think it is important to describe to the new UMKC undergraduate why we procrastinate and what the five-metacognition errors are. The five errors described in the video, Psychology of Action June 2015, are that we often underestimate how long it will take us to complete a specific task. The second reason is that we overestimate how much time is remaining until we must have the task completed. The third reason is that we often think that in the future we will somehow have more motivation to do the work. Another reason is that we believe that we have to feel like it or actually want a task for it to become quality work. In turn, not feeling like doing an assignment will result in

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.

     To procrastinate is to put off doing something out of casual carelessness or common laziness. It often needlessly postpones or delays events or objectives in your life which can effect others. Procrastination is almost like a drug in your life, because once you start doing it a little bit, it slowly adds up to a dependency that you will find to be common habit. Although this is what we all perceive procrastination to be bad, there are some benefits to it. It can have beneficial impact on how you take pressure, or how well you can act when time is limited.

The most common thing I heard about college before I got here was that college students are always under a tremendous amount of stress and have no free time to do anything other than school work. I was afraid that I would be so overloaded with school work that I would be miserable and lose the motivation to do any of it. In high school I always waited until the last minute to do any of my assignments and that led to me struggling to keep A’s and B’s. This also led to me stressing out over assignments that I had plenty of time to do. It was a simple problem that I could have solved just by using proper time management.

1.      What am I talking about? I am the thief of productiveness and time. I sound simple, but in fact I’m quite complex. I am a strange phenomenon. My purpose seems to make my life more pleasant, but instead it almost always adds stress, disorganization, and frequent failure. I want to achieve some outcome, usually something myself and others can value and respect; “I’ve got to start.” I delay briefly thinking of real and imagined advantages of starting to change later; “I will do it tomorrow.”

(Piers Steel, Thomas Brothen, Catherine Wambach 2001) study looks at relationship between procrastination, personality, performance and mood in 152 undergraduates. The study relied on self-evaluations from the participants. The participants first had to complete a

“I’ll stop procrastinating…Tomorrow.” This is a mindset that is possessed by a majority of students today. Although putting off writing that English paper until the night before it is due may not seem like a big deal, it has many harmful effects. In fact, what better topic is there for that English paper? Very few are spared from the epidemic known as procrastination. Even less overcome this issue. In order to successfully defeat procrastination, we must first understand it.

Zeenath and Ocrullo (2012) indicated that university students procrastinate because of its affective consequences. External factors, such as peer influence and coping strategies, surrounding them also contribute to this. Furthermore, the way of teaching of the professors also affects the performance of the students toward the tasks given to them. Procrastination is the reason behind the poor academic performance and unhealthy lifestyle of the students. However, even if the individuals receive negative consequences, they still choose to

Procrastination is ignoring your responsibilities and avoiding them for no good reason. Experiencing procrastination can have a positive or negative reaction according to the amount of the behavior. The person that is procrastinating must first realize that they have a problem in order to find ways to overcome procrastination because they are putting their health, family and job at risk. Twenty percent of people realize they are procrastinators which in the end becomes a lifestyle. There are various reasons why people procrastinate.

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.

Procrastination, putting things off until the last minute, can have serious consequences on a person's life. I fully agree with this statement because I have personally been affected by procrastination, waiting until the last minute will never do you any good. The main reason why procrastination isn't a great idea is because the amount of stress that comes along with doing things at the very last minute. When you get stressed you're more prone to making mistakes than if you did it a week before the project was due, the more mistakes the worse your grade will be. It is very hard to take care of the small detail when you're in such hurry just to complete the project.

An equally important cause for procrastinating could be the laziness one might have. For a college student, several amounts of homework could be assigned within the first week of school, but the professor might state that those specific assignments to that class will be due at the end of the semester. So, one would say to themselves that there is plenty of time not to worry, so the student kicks back and worries about other things. Once, the end of the semester comes the person could have forgotten about the assignment that was given in the beginning of their school year. Now, there is little time to get the tasks finished and turned in, while other teachers in other classes might have assigned homework for the same due date as the other professor. Of course, at this point, the student regrets the decision that he or she might have made to procrastinate until a couple of days before the due date, now the