The reason students procrastinate.
It’s because they have zero motivation.
Or when there’s some motivation, the task to do feels too huge to start.
The solution: not everything is worth doing.
For real, you shouldn’t feel bad about all your procrastination in college.
Why?
Because procrastination is usually telling you something more about yourself. Or the task you have to do.
A good number of the things you procrastinate on are things your mind is informing you that really shouldn’t be working on in the first place. But somehow you’re subjected to these things.
And because of the way school is designed, you can’t choose not to do them or you’ll be punished with a bad grade.
Power nap is not the solution; awareness is.
First: accept the reality.
Step two: choose which tasks to do and which to ignore.
Step three: focus first on the ones to do first then put the minimum, passable effort on those to ignore. That’s it.
Totally okay to procrastinate on some.
Some assignments are just not worth your time or energy, so you should procrastinate.
You don’t learn anything, they are not things you think you’ll need now or in the future, and frankly speaking they’re unlikely to affect your future opportunities if you get a low grade in them.
For those, I say procrastinate, get a passing grade and move on.
For example: taking an accounting class. I always knew it was useless to me (I’ll hire an accountant if I need one), and I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about what a “ledger” is. Or the hundreds of outdated case studies to go through.
I’m glad I didn’t.
Over a decade later, guess what? It had zero impact.
Surprisingly, I’ve picked up things on my own that I later learned fell under Accounting (like P/E ratio, balance sheets, bonds) but as far as I recall, the syllabus back then had way too many nonsensical topics.
And nothing remotely interesting or connected to our everyday life.
So I did only enough just to pass the class.
You should do the same.
Procrastinate on absolute nonsense assignments in college. Give it your tiniest, passable effort. Then be gone.
But be smart about what you choose to procrastinate.
You can’t do this for everything.
For example: let’s say you’re a computer science student, fascinated by Machine Learning and see yourself going more and more down this road, and yet you’re hating on Statistics hard.
Yeah… that’s a problem.
Skip Stats and you’ll continue to hurt down the road.
Like a lot!
Even with all the fancy tools coming out, lacking a deep understanding of the fundamentals will only limit how far you can go later. I’ve seen this too many times.
So you don’t want to procrastinate on things that could have direct, longterm impact. For those, stay on it.
In fact, when in doubt, do it.
Remember, procrastination is information.
So the next time you find yourself procrastinating in school, it’s a sign to think of the long-term impact of the task at hand. Then decide how much time is truly worth giving to it.
For things that direct impact you, buckle up and do as much as you can.
For others, procrastinate, do the required minimum, and move on.
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