Wisdom Wednesday #9 - The Cost of Procrastination

Welcome to Wisdom Wednesday edition 9! This week, I will be discussing the cost of procrastination—which is ironic because it is currently 10:52 PM (sorry Gavin) and I need to get the next Wisdom Wednesday done and quick.

Procrastination is a common issue among many students, workers, and people alike. Though we all recognize this habit as a detrimental problem—it creates a lot of stress, sleeplessness, anger, and other negative emotions—we cannot seem to break it. No matter what we do, whether it be telling yourself to “lock in” or trying to detach from your phone, it keeps coming back without us realizing it.

Recently, I have been getting gradually fewer hours of sleep because of my routine of pushing back assignments, delaying studying, and waiting to complete other commitments. This has led to poorer performance in school, tiredness, lack of focus, and overall worsened moods throughout my day. I don’t feel the same as I do with full energy, and it’s because of my issue to act on tasks early.

As each deadline quickly approaches, I feel the pressure of completing everything on time creeping up until there’s genuinely no more time left and I tough out a half-hearted output. I miss details I want to include, which in turn leads to lower grades. This is undoubtedly very frustrating and tolls my mental health. The more I delay, the more it eats at my peace of mind, making it harder to focus on other tasks.

The real detriment with procrastination happens in the long term. As you become accustomed to putting things off, you build habits of poor time management, leading to worse grades, relationships, and self-esteem. Consistently leaving tasks for the last minute closes the opportunity to improve and understand the material thoroughly, and your performance with the task at hand will suffer as a result.

The time that you waste procrastinating is time you will never get back. The burden of understanding that you just dedicated hours of your life doing nothing instead of improving yourself or finishing that big, scary project that you wanted to do reduces your growth, learning, and potential.

Without a doubt, breaking free from the cycle is challenging. Throughout my high school career, I have been victim to the evil chokehold that is stalling. But, the following tactics have helped me tremendously:

1. Set short deadlines. This is a really useful tool to utilize when there’s a deadline far away for something major that you know needs a lot of time dedication. Having a strict, close-by deadline allows you to complete chunks of a big task little-by-little, which in turn alleviates the burden of needing to complete the entire thing at once.

2. Detach from your distractions. This one is self-explanatory. If you remove yourself from the root of the problem, it will be hard to agitate it and make your procrastination worse. For times I know I need to complete a lot of assignments or I know they’ll take long, I’ll head to the library and give my phone to my friend sitting at another table. This frees my mind from the urge to check my distracting phone, which allows me to focus on my work better.

3. Be consistent. I cannot emphasize this enough. If you are consistent with what I listed above, you will start to build the foundation to better habits, and procrastination will be a distant memory. Though to build consistency, emphasize starting with smaller tasks to motivate yourself and get the ball rolling.

That is it for this edition of Wisdom Wednesday! Try to build a better you, and trust the process. Peace and love to you all.

- Jaime Paladi, Public Relations
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