Ranking right up there with rent, bills and insensitive professors, procrastination is one of every college student's worst enemies. It allows us to do what we want to do, but then forces us to put in hurried, less-than-spectacular performances on assignments and projects that we are avoiding.
Every day, it seems like some sort of sacrifice has to be made to fit everything into our schedules. This means that more often than not something we had planned on checking off the ever-growing list of things to do gets pushed to the back burner. For many college students, that something is frequently an assignment or project that has a deadline quickly approaching.
"I'll just do that tomorrow."
It is a phrase that we have all uttered when we get a call from a friend who wants to go get a drink or when we have to spend the night at work. For some reason, we always seem to think that tomorrow will, for some reason, have endless amounts of time for us to catch up on whatever we've put off.
Here's a shocker, though: No one has ever seen a tomorrow.
Tomorrow is an impossibility. Sure, we all know it means the day after the day that we are currently in, but by the time it rolls around, it isn't tomorrow anymore. It is today.
Think about it.
The clock ticks down constantly. It goes from 11:59:59 p.m. to 12:00:00 a.m. in the blink of an eye. All of the sudden, Sunday is Monday, Monday is Tuesday and so on. When we wake up in the morning, we don't wake up in a tomorrow. We wake up in a today, and once again our plates are more full than a starving man's at an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. The problem is, most of the time our day looks far less appealing than a mound of fried rice, half a dozen crab rangoon and an egg roll.
So what do we do? We become selective and once again use the imaginary tomorrow to keep ourselves from feeling overwhelmed. What usually ends up happening, though, is our obligations and commitments continue to pile up until we have to sacrifice doing something that is either extremely important or something we really wanted to do.
There is really only one way to prevent procrastination: Don't do it. It seems so simple, but it is true.
Let's face it, there are going to be tons of times this semester that we are asked to do things that we aren't going to want to do. It is so easy to put it off for a day, but that just ends up pushing back more stuff. Eventually, we are in a hole we can't climb out of and an opportunity to have some fun comes that we have to pass up because we are "too busy."
Procrastination has had a stranglehold on our lives for far too long. I say it is time we fight back and show procrastination that it doesn't control us.
The revolution starts today, not tomorrow.
Write to Cole at cpmcgrath@bsu.edu
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