Once Upon a Time: When I Discovered Procrastination
There’s just too much to do in life and not enough time to accomplish it.
At least, that seems to be my excuse.
I was talking to my mom the other day, and she was telling me about how she watched a video (or read an article? I don’t quite remember to be honest) about procrastination, and the reason that people don’t get things done. According to whatever it was that she watched or read, the reason is the reasons.
At first I was a bit puzzled. I didn’t know at all what she meant. After all, procrastination is just finding reasons to do anything but the-
And that’s when I got it.
Procrastination seems to be thought of as simply trying to do everything but the required task. But if you look at it a bit closer, a lot of the times procrastination happens by finding excuses not to do what’s needed. Take something like an art project, for example. One might say, “oh, I just can’t get that done because I don’t have the materials I need to do this,” and just leave it alone, not even making an attempt to get it done.
When I was younger, in fourth, fifth, and even sixth grade, I would never miss a homework assignment. I would immediately come home from school and finish my work off in the first half an hour, and then I’d go on to do everything else. Going into seventh grade, I was so confident that I could handle the workload. But then I was introduced to DeviantART, Tumblr, and other sites along that line. From then on my time started getting sapped away minute by minute and I couldn’t figure out why.eed to do it!” And at the moment, it might make perfect sense. In retrospect, though, it’s just another excuse. If there was a way to fix the problem of not having those particular materials, the art project would get done, wouldn’t it?
I’ve been trying to get my work habits back on track this year, because I know I’ll need them as I grow older. Even next year in tenth grade I know that I’m going to be relying on them a lot to get me through all the homework and extracurriculers.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Maybe if I could stop thinking about what I don’t have an
d finding ways to get what I need, I’d be able to finally create something big. Maybe if I could stop overthinking every single thing I want to do, I’d actually get it done. For me, procrastination and overthinking seem to go hand-in-hand with each other.
So I guess I have yet another resolution to check off the list: Get rid of the excuses.
Peace, love, and procrastination,
Arya