BY BEL SANTO || MOSPRESS
Procrastination plagues pretty much everyone, and though it is fundamentally counterproductive, for some people it’s just how they work. The trick is figuring out what makes you most productive, and not stressing if it’s unconventional.
Anxiety and Procrastination
For some with anxiety disorders, procrastination results from a ‘fight or flight’ response to the stress of a task, such as studying or meeting a deadline for an assignment. Sometimes the fear of the task itself can spur you into putting it off until it’s the night before the due date, and you need to stay up into the early morning getting everything completed. This ‘flight’ response to stressful tasks can be tormenting to someone with anxiety: you want to get something done within a reasonable timeframe but your mind just doesn’t seem to want to corporate, and it’s easy to punish yourself for this. But perhaps procrastination makes you work better.
Procrastination: a Method
If you procrastinate chronically, it may just be because you work best under pressure. If your best results are coming from last minute frenzy, perhaps procrastination is your method of madness. So don’t feel bad if you can’t stop yourself from putting everything off; that may just be how you work best, so take the stress out of the situation and accept that this is how you will get the best results.
Knowing When to Stop
There’s a fine balance between accepting procrastination and fully rejecting responsibilities, so for each situation you are in, figure out what needs to be done, and when you really do need to do it. For something like a Year 12 major work or project, you can’t pull something of worth together the night before, that’s not how the task is designed. So know when you need to complete steps of the task, and then make a calendar, creating your own mini deadlines that will push you to get sections of your task done when it feels like it’s a last-minute high-pressure situation. Work with your procrastination, making sure you utilise it to make you perform your best, rather than just announce that it’ll happen when it happens, because that’s only going to put you at a disadvantage. If you know what works for you, analyse the process and make sure you’re taking advantage of your natural methods to maximise the process.
