by Ashanti Wright
You do it almost every day: you get up, hit the snooze button and climb right back in bed. Ten minutes later, you take a shower, brush your teeth and get dressed. By the time you get to school, you’re desperately flipping through notes before a quiz. Of course, you could have avoided this by simply studying ahead of time, but you love doing things the hard way.
Once the teacher slams the bright white paper (or colored if they’re feeling spunky) on the desk, it’s game over. Sorry. You’ve been dealt a go-to-jail card. The odor of the well-earned “F” rises from your paper.
Why did your morning put you behind bars? Procrastination. The ability to access instant information is destroying our time management skills. Quick access to information creates the illusion that if you can get to it faster, then you can finish it faster too.
Even when you wait to the last minute, you think you have plenty of time to finish your work. When the last minute rolls around, you stare at your computer screen wishing the paper would write itself.
Students probably think that procrastination just leads to bad grades, but the big “P” has an even uglier side effect: stress. A hefty daily dose of stress can cause anxiety, excessive worrying, colds and other problems that make you feel like the whole world is in your book bag.
No big deal, though. The majority of students and adults procrastinate, right? In an unofficial survey, seven out of 10 classmates say they procrastinate, and I’m one of them. All we need to do is stop, take a deep breath, count to three and do our homework in advance.
In the future, I’m going work on practicing what I preach. For now, this column is due in five minutes, and I just passed the required word count.
Recent Comments