Procrastination At Its Finest

For a good number of High School students, first semester is coming to a screeching halt. And with that comes a frenzy, yes, I'm referring to the scrambling to finish all of those assignments you pushed off so you can trudge across the finish line on both feet. In shorter terms, procrastination.

Take these blogs for example: it's an assignment for my American Studies class. Once a week we are instructed to sit down, think about the world critically, and publish it for the world to see. Doesn't seem too hard right? Well these blogs are due tomorrow. Over the past 24 hours, a plethora of blogposts have appeared from many of my classmates on my class's American Studies webpage (including myself). And as I was thinking about good material for the last hurrah of my first semester posts, I thought about what was so hard about this assignment that made it impossible to keep up.

Psychology Today stated that, "procrastinators are not born. Procrastination is learned in the family milieu." It's become like a disease in that sense. Once you catch it, you become a perpetual slacker. That may be a bit extreme, but it does become a nasty habit. James Surowiecki wrote in The New Yorker that the time you spend pushing off your work to watch your favorite shows (or any of the examples in the pie chart above) you are in fact, "actually engaging in a practice that illuminates the fluidity of human identity and the complicated relationship that humans have to time." In other words, it has become a human impulse.

I don't know if it's the thrill of living on the edge that makes us wait until the last minute, or just the overwhelming amount of other priorities we have. But I think that we value our free time to the point where we will put almost anything ahead of schoolwork until it's absolutely imperative. And I'm very interested to see what my fellow classmates are thinking, as we all stumble to the end of the fickle beast that is first semester.