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Friday, November 8, 2013

The Cycle of Procrastination

One of the biggest things I’ve struggled with since coming to college is time management. How do I balance my time between school work and socializing? Is it even possible? The answer is yes…sometimes. And what about procrastination? How does that fit in?

Keeping up on schoolwork is generally not an issue, but some weeks, things just slip through my fingers and I find myself a victim of procrastination. That’s right. I don‘t intend to procrastinate, it just, well, it just happens.

Image I took in September of my planner
of a particularly bad Monday-Wednesday.
But, I’m not blaming my inability to get ahead on procrastination - not exactly. I know that I could start projects and other assignments earlier than I do, but that’s not always possible.

For example, take the week I had 13 papers due. I hadn’t started any of them before the Sunday leading up to that week as a result of having so many other things due the previous week. The thought of having 13 papers wasn’t even on my radar. I thought I would have my usual 4-5 due. But that wasn’t the case when I went through and counted.

The longest paper I had due that week was 5-6 pages double-spaced and it was due that Friday. Luckily, the rest of the papers I had to write were less than 2 pages, but they were all single-spaced.

As that week started, I didn’t even know where to begin, let alone how to manage my time. And I guess that’s just it.

Sometimes, the workload in college can be so unpredictable and unexpected that there really is no effective way to time manage all of the time. What works one week may not work the next. It’s a sort of guessing game.

But that’s part of the fun of college. It’s hard to have two days, let alone two weeks, in a row, that are the same. While this definitely makes time management more difficult, it’s a learning experience.

Trying not to procrastinate is something I’ve gotten a lot better at. In high school, I was pretty good at writing a paper the night before it was due, and I’m not entirely proud of that. Now, I try to write my papers a few days in advance, if at all possible, so that I can go back and revise what I’ve written before I turn them in.

This is definitely something I still need to work on. I was better about not procrastinating last semester when I didn’t have as large of a class load, but, again, it’s a learning experience.

It takes time to stop procrastinating, as procrastination is a habit. But it’s a cycle that can be broken, it just takes time and effort. Time that not every college student has…

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