Speech Against Procrastination

Being careless about my education, I was not concerned about how my grades would affect me in the future. I was more concerned about going against what my parents were telling me just to make them furious. I always saw myself as an average student so I really did not mind missing school and paying much attention to it. At the time, it did not seem like a big deal to me but realizing what I had done with my education was a mistake. Those bad habits I picked up throughout the years ended up making the rest of my high school career difficult. I made things that were useless seem important. I put those first when in reality they were not that important and I could have simply pushed it away. This is where I was starting to realize that I needed a wakeup call. I needed to set priorities for myself that was going to put my education back on track.

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

I found I’m not alone according to two leading experts on procrastination, Joseph Ferrari, professor of psychology at DePaul University and Timothy Phikul, professor of psychology at Carleton University 20% of people identify themselves as chronic procrastinators and up to 70 percent of students in one study said that they procrastinate. This habit affects so many and it one of the most difficult tendencies to kick but fortunately there are ways to go about solving the issue so today I would like to inform you all about why people procrastinate and the effects it can have and also ways to overcome it.

Telling myself that I was too good for anything lower than an A, and being the only accepted 10th-grader, I was certain that I would hold one of the top seats in academics by the end of the year. I was wrong. I ended the semester with 4 C’s. Waking at 5AM then carpooling with a family who lived 45 minutes away and arriving home at 8PM with 5 hours of studying, I would mull over how Bowman Favan was better than me in English, and if I worked longer during my usual 4AM nights. I told myself that I could only beat Bowman if I was 100% self-reliant like he was.

I failed AP English. I had missed the second quarter of the school year, almost completely, due to… technical difficulties. I got discharged from the hospital mid-February, and for the remainder of junior year, the majority of my waking thoughts revolved around passing 11th grade. With motivational speeches coming at me from my parents, friends, and teachers, I began to believe I had a chance of passing the year. I did my best, which apparently was not enough. My teacher had picked up on my tremendous amount of effort, and on the last day of school, bumped my grade up to a low D — just enough to pass. I was not exactly about to put my grade on display or anything, but I passed! Technically. This is not one of the underdog-who-succeeded stories. The real success for me was (look away, it’s cliché) realizing my best was enough. I sound disgusting.

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.

Thesis: Procrastination is the main result of disorganization whether it’s at home, work or school.

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.

Transition: After learning about the science behind procrastination, I want to talk about why we procrastinate.

The problem of procrastination starts when a student waits until minutes before a class to study for a class. This may seem like a solution for students who are pressed for time; however, this doesn’t allow time for the information to be solidified and vital information can be lost. These behaviors form because students have found that in the past they were able to successfully pass the class by doing their homework literally hours before the projects deadline. This reckless learning may help pass the class, but doesn’t give the information the time needed to be solidified into memory. This reckless learning also produces effects within projects that are often below the students’ academic level and can cause

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.

Procrastination is a common tendency that we all give in to and all of us have at least a little experience with.

Attention Getter: We all have been there when we wait until the last minute to write a paper or study for an exam. We struggle to get these things done and this struggle is called procrastination.

In the TED Talk, “Inside the Mind of a Procrastinator,” Tim Urban speaks about how procrastinators become to be. In Urban’s talk, he talks about three procrastinator characters. The first character is The Rational-Decision Maker and what this character does is he makes the productive decision. The second character is the Gratification Monkey and tries to make the Rational-Decision Maker get off task whenever possible. The Gratification Monkey is what makes people get off task when they are working and the reason they do not finish their work in time. Last but not least the Panic Monster. The Panic Monster is the character that when a deadline comes up it scares away the monkey, therefore they can get the person work done. While describing these

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