Procrastination article By orla Tyson Two hours left before the deadline of an assignment you had been given over three weeks ago. You’re rushing and panicking. You’re about to text your friends to ask if they’ve done the work and deep down you’re hoping they’re going to say they can’t be bothered but realistically you know they’ve given it in a week ago. So how did you get here? Rushing obsessively, making sure this half complete assignment is given in on time. Just a thought but maybe it was all that time spent scrolling through the same feed on social media, liking the same pictures over and over. Sound familiar? Don’t worry! We all do it, maybe more then we’d like to admit but what is this thing that stops us from getting our work done? What causes it? And how could we prevent it?
This irritating trait that most people have but don’t want to admit would be procrastinating. Procrastinating is the action of delaying or postponing something that we are meant to do, generally delaying something that would have a long term effect on us like not doing your homework. Procrastination is mostly common in students, research shows that 80-95% of students go through it from the following reasons. First one being a fear of failure. Nobody wants to fail and having loads of work to do on top of that stress doesn’t help, we students tend to talk ourselves out of work without even realising we would rather run 5 miles straight then having to sit down and study. The second reason is low level energy, this is caused by poor sleeping, poor eating and drinking drastically more than eating. McDonald’s or a green salad? We all know what the answer would be. In all that junk food we eat it lacks significant protein and carbohydrates which is what we need to keep us to stay awake and focus. So how do we prevent it?
With a few simple steps your next assignment will be in a whole week early. Firstly plan what you have to do throughout the day in the morning, I know most of you are thinking you wake up thirty minutes before you have to rush out the house for school but maybe try to set an alarm out of your comfort zone like waking up at 6am. Write a list of things you must get through the day like the pass criteria of your assignment or read the next chapter of the book your teacher told you to read. Next step would be ensure you have adequate energy. This is one of the most important ones, drinking Lucozade and eating a pack of chocolate rolls isn’t enough or even close to being the right type of energy you need. According to consultant Alex Richardson you need a verity of different types of food to be fully focused throughout the day so have some wholegrain foods, fruit and water. So that’s 2-3 slices of toast slap on any topping from jam to Nutella, have a banana on the slide and some water sounds good enough. The last few steps would be starting your work, ABSOLUTELY NO DISTRACTIONS!! I know it’s tempting to look at that ten second story on snapchat but for the sake of your education just put it on airplane mode for thirty minutes, lastly would be having little fifteen minute breaks if you plan on doing work for a long period of time. Guess what that’s it follow those steps and you’re a golden student.
At the end of the day don’t beat yourself up if your struggling to focus and get work done as a survey shows that the average adults works only around three hours a day out of an eight hour shift. This suggests that most people do go through procrastination it’s just important to know how to resolve it.
