Procrastination: Something I’m Unfortunately Really Good At.

I can share with you how bad it messes up my life and hopefully encourage you to start with me the journey of letting go of that habit.

Author: Utuje Bénie

Everyone has some bad habits they could do without. One of them might be procrastination; something I’m unfortunately really good at.

You might want to ask me;” why do you believe yourself qualified to be lecturing people on how to stop procrastinating if you are still struggling with it yourself?” Honestly, I don’t. But I can share with you how bad it messes up my life and hopefully encourage you to start with me the journey of letting go of that habit.

I can’t remember the last time I did my assignment at least one day before the deadline. To say that I always forget, that would be a lie. It’s just that whenever I think of doing it, I always immediately find a reason not to.

When I think of how I behaved last term at school, that’s when I realize how bad my condition has gotten. For instance; I would be in prep and read a novel the whole time in order to distract my mind from the fact that I haven’t done my homework yet, and then I would tell myself that I will find the answers from my notes first thing in the morning.

Then in the morning, I would wake up to realize that when the teacher gave us the notes, I didn’t copy them because I was waiting to take them during prep.

We usually postpone things that we are not naturally excited to do in order to do things that are easier, more enjoyable and unfortunately less valuable.

Until now, I cannot understand why someone, in their right minds, would choose to relax and then work after. Yet, that’s exactly what I always do. It’s silly, right?

The thing is; the more we procrastinate, the less it feels wrong. In fact, it can reach a point where someone doesn’t feel guilty anymore and the chances of changing are almost zero, since they don’t even remember that they need to.

Why is procrastination such a bad thing if you are still going to do your duties?

• When you postpone something today, you can’t be sure that you won’t postpone it again tomorrow. I think many people can agree with me on this one. That’s why it is said that ‘tomorrow never comes’

• Everything has its own time, postponing something means that you are also going to postpone another thing in order to get time to do the former.

• Work done at the last minute is never done as excellently as work done at the right time. The difference may not be apparent to you but you will certainly be more stressed than if you had done it before.

• People who procrastinate are likely to experience high levels of stress, anxiety, and it can result into serious issues like low self-esteem and depression.

• Why would you choose to develop a bad habit knowing that it will be hard to break? Your daily schedule may not be so tight right now, but eventually your responsibilities may increase and it would be quite difficult for you to cope.

• We ruin our future by saving the difficult work of today for tomorrow. Every day we only wake up with enough strength to do today’s work, not today and yesterday’s work.

James Albery said it well in his quote:

“He slept beneath moon, He basked beneath the sun; He lived a life of going to do and died with nothing done.”

It is time we started acting responsible if we don’t want to die with nothing done, or regret not doing certain things when we still had time. The choices we make now, determine who we really are and they highly affect our future.

Deciding today

If you have a habit of procrastinating like me, you may decide to let it go after reading this, but if you don’t start now, you won’t start tomorrow. Believe me, I’ve tried so many times.

Let me finish by thanking those who are genuinely willing to cultivate the spirit of doing it now. By hard work and consistency, procrastination won’t even cross our minds in the future.