Procrastination. An extremely ironic topic for this article. A situation I have often found myself in is having a task on my to do list and forefront of my mind for well before its deadline but when the deadline day finally rolls around, I look back and reflect on how I seemingly chose to do anything else before this one task. Even now I have finally committed to writing this article I have the urge to hoover my floor, go meal prep and start planning my formative essays (which are due in many week’s time). I know I’m not alone in this. For example, at sixth form, a community of “procrastinators” and “last minuters” basically formed. The tension in the air and sound of rapid typing in the library the period before an essay was due became a regular occurrence. And Durham is not any different. The plague of procrastination has seemingly infected every academic setting, and I assume many more environments.

So why is this? One may assume that procrastination comes from a disdain of the task itself. That it is an active choice to delay its completion due to a tedious or unpleasant nature. But this isn’t true. Procrastination does not discriminate. Whether an essay is interesting or not or a task is beneficial or useless it is still at risk to being pushed back until the day of the deadline. So maybe we procrastinate because we lack motivation or to put it bluntly, we are lazy. Now that can’t be right. I’m sure many of my fellow procrastinators reading this have many achievements to rebut this point, including perhaps getting into Durham. Achievements that took large amounts of work, motivation and dedication. So if not laziness or dread, what is the root of procrastination?

As a chronic procrastinator, this is something I have puzzled with for a long time as it is difficult to solve a problem without knowing a cause. I have a few plausible explanations: fear of failure, impatience for completion and consuming stress. Often, we put off tasks which have great importance like the final draft of our course work or an essay which contributes to our final grade. So perhaps as we are aware that the quality of our task completion must be to a high standard, so we delay starting to avoid these fears of failure or stress. Perhaps procrastination can act as a form of self-preservation; we want to avoid for as long as possible these fears of failure we may have when completing the task. On the other hand, we may already be having these fears of failure and are already becoming stressed at the prospect of the task. This is something I have experienced often. The stress around the task becoming greater and more consuming the task itself. Maybe we leave things till last minute because we fill up the time, in which we should be working, with stress. Or finally, we may just crave that feeling of completion, the short serotonin boost that comes with ticking something off your to do list. If a task is larger or takes more effort and active engagement, it is more difficult to have that feeling of relief. So instead, we complete every smaller task or task that requires little engagement that we can and enjoy the satisfaction of ticking them all off one by one. Looking at procrastination from this angle is helpful – it no longer seems like an innate unsolvable issue.

Although evidently, I seem to have fallen victim to the procrastination plague again writing this article has helped me to reflect on ways this cycle can be escaped. If you do crave this short-term validation of completing a task perhaps you could break the task down. For example, instead of ‘write essay’, we pose the task as: ‘plan essay’, ‘reading for point a’, ‘reading for point b’, ‘reading for point c’, ‘draft thesis’, ‘draft paragraph 1’ etc. For those procrastinators who are completion validation cravers you can turn that one monstrous task into at least six short activities. Or if you (like me) find your stress or fear of failure are what makes you susceptible to being infected with procrastination illness, maybe time blocking is the answer for you. Instead of focusing on the end product and the ambiguity of its success, take one dedicated hour per day (flexible dependent on task and schedule) to work towards this final product and don’t concern yourself with how far you have to go but instead how much you have completed. Keeping positive appears to be the solution to most problems, including this one. I’m sure there are many other ways to get over this habit but the most important thing to focus on is not dismissing yourself as lazy or unmotivated. Although procrastination seems to have gained this blameful reputation, to me it is clear there are much deeper causes.