PROCRASTINATION
A Student’s Guide
It’s that time again-study season. A season that
creates mass panic, mass cramming, mass stress and mass procrastination. There’s
nothing quite like exam-stress to force you in to a maddening bout of finding
things that really don’t need to be done but suddenly MUST be done with a
fervour that would have anyone suspect that you were the most diligent of
workers in the world. It’s like once a book is produced that your eyes start
wandering and then BAM they land on something remotely in need of a quick
tidy/reorganizing/mass overhaul and you’re off. Except these stints are never
quick, as I’ve come to realize. They can potentially consume an hour. They can
potentially consume the whole day if needs be. It just depends how creative you
can get with things...
If you look on the bright side of exam-season, I like
to think of it as a “get-shit-done” phase (*NOTE the “shit getting done” does
not include any study of any form). For instance, my room-usually an
impenetrable fort of strewn clothes and general mess-is now a blissful oasis of
organization. My desk has colour-coded sticky notes plastered in a Roman-style mosaic
formation to remind me what exactly I should be doing every day. My socks are
paired. PAIRED for Christ’s sake. It seems I have exhausted literally every
avenue available to me to put off study and immerse myself in some other banal
task.
As it appears, I am not the only one to be pulled in
by the black-hole of procrastination. One friend has suddenly taken up
leisurely strolls on the beach, another likes to send me Facebook pictures
documenting how her studying is going. As
for me, I’ve decided to watch the whole series of Geordie Shore from the
beginning, plus a healthy dose of The Valleys because nothing screams A+s all
around than some seriously trashy tv-viewing.
As much as procrastinating is putting off what exactly
you should be doing during reading week-studying-let’s not become too critical
of it. I mean, you ARE doing something and that something is of worth in some
minute part of your life. Probably very minute, at the very periphery of your
existence but no matter. Your efforts are not in vain. You have successfully
chosen the most inopportune time to spring-clean your wardrobe, paint your
nails, read a completely irrelevant book and watch some wholly exam-unrelated
material but fuck it, you will be the best dressed, most feng-shui and informed
student on all trashy reality tv shows going walking in to that exam hall. There's more to life than exams and procrastination shows us that-there is quite literally, HEAPS of other things to do outside of exams and I plan to tackle every single one of them before I actually genuinely have to study.
