PROCRASTINATION: NOW OR NEVER

By Olawuyi Taiwo

I looked at my wrist watch, it was already 10pm prompt, I was puzzled and immediately I know it was all my fault. I should have done it before. Students of nowadays find it highly reluctant to accept the fact that today’s activities determines the success or failure of tomorrow.

Procrastination is the avoidance of doing a task that needs to be accomplished. It is an element that steal someone’s time away, often and most of the time it makes dream to be unrealizable. It is a non-focused devilish act to experience failure in life. You have an assignment to submit in two days’ time but instead of doing such assignment before the deadline expire, you prefer to do it at the rushing hour. Do you know what you have missed because of postponing and postponing till that moment you are meant to submit, it is really a devilish act just for an individual not to succeed. It is an act that could lead to feelings of inadequacy, guilt, self-doubt and depression.

Procrastination comes in diverse ways, one of the common means is the misplacement of priority, doing unnecessary things joyfully at the expense of important schedules that needs to be attended to first. What I have come to realize about these unnecessary activities is that they do not add any significant value to us, we will either be chatting or busy arguing with a roommate or course mate. We tend to forget the root causes of this act is either as a result of our lackluster attitude or due to laziness. Sometimes you postpone an important activity for another important ones, but you cannot simply rob A to save B. You need to check your daily plan and strategize your time so that two important tasks won’t come up at the same time. 

As procrastination gain the larger part of student activities, it tends to lead to difficulty in determining the success of tomorrow, and most of the time the end result of procrastinating is disappointment. If you refuse to read at the time you suppose to read, or you refuse to stand on your bed early in the morning to prepare for the day, such time cannot be regain back, it has gone forever. A scholar once said, “If you will lose something, it shouldn’t be time because of its valuable characteristics”.

Moreover, you may have tried to stop postponing your activities anyhow but you still find yourself back in that situation, firstly you need to cultivate the habit of being able to discipline yourself. You need to be able to make decision without contemplating, when you are meant to say YES, say it out loud and boldly. You want to read and you find yourself feeling asleep within the first 20 minutes, you need to tell that sleep to go back to where it is coming from. Mostly, procrastination comes when you call for it, therefore you need to make that decision of switching off your phone against calling procrastination and be disciplined not to move near the phone to avoid temptation of calling procrastination.

If you are disciplined you will be able to combat laziness and lackluster attitudes. The moment when you are about to postpone washing of your dirty clothes and you don’t feel like washing again , you won’t allow such feeling to overcome you. You will realized that this is laziness and because you are disciplined you won’t postpone the washing.

Likewise, for misplacement and mismanagement of time, if you are disciplined, you will make a daily plan that you will always follow strictly in such a way that when it gets to an activity you won’t postpone it till another time. Also, when it gets to leisure time you won’t feel you are wasting your time. Make sure you plan your time well and be disciplined enough to follow it. However, your plan must be flexible in case an uncontrolled and urgent circumstances show up.

Just like the common saying, “Prevention is better than cure”, let us train ourselves into being a disciplined person so that the moment we are tempted to postpone an activity we will have the gut to say NO. Cease from procrastinating so that at the end there won’t be room for saying “how I wish to have done this before”.