Procrastination: everything you’ll do, before you do your work

We’re all guilty of it, continually putting off work in order to do the most ridiculous things to avoid work.

You make excuses, become extremely motivated for the most mundane of tasks to justify not working.“Oh, but I was meant to do this earlier”, or “this won’t take long… I’ll do it first”, and then you hit the blind panic that you’ve got three hours to write 2000 words.

Here are the six stages of procrastination. Yes this is one of them.

The Setup

You’ve got your pens out, you’ve lined up your paper, your laptop is charged and you’ve got a playlist ready, right? You’re motivated, raring to go, you’ve got this! But… that was an awful lot of effort before you’ve even started, kick back, have a break, you deserve it. We all know someone who spends more time setting up, than they do working.

Could this look any less appealing?

The Denial 

The next step, denial. That 2500 word essay will be easy to write in a day, you don’t need to start now… instead you could watch a movie, go on a walk, go get a drink. Anything to get away from it, sound familiar? When is the last possible time you can start your work, Sunday night, due on Monday? Easy, off to the pub.

The Distraction

Distractions, whether you claim they’re productive or not, are undoubtedly one of students biggest downfalls. Whilst running away from your work, you think of hundreds of other things you could be doing, literally anything else you could be doing. Finally tidy your room, wash the dishes, check your email, read The Tab? Yeah I’m calling you out, straight-up avoidance of your work, welcome!

Literally anything can become ten times more interesting than it was an hour ago, everything becomes an exciting new way of ignoring the revision you should be doing.

Now is the perfect time to wash this up!

The Justification 

This one links back to stage three. The distraction, whatever it may be, has lead you away from your work, but now you have to justify it. Whether it’s defending said distraction or justifying the work deadline… you have ages right… give yourself that hour off…

The Panic

Here we are, the worst of all the stages. The blind panic and growing regret, its 2am, you’ve not started, it’s due today. You’ve only got a few hours to finish your work, you start to have a meltdown, might even shed a few tears. But then you’ll pull yourself together, pull an all-nighter and get your work in right on time, smashed it.

Repeat

We go again.