We’ve All Been There: Procrastinating

By Lauren

Your 10 page paper on the complete works of Shakespeare is due in less than a week. You vowed to spend all of Sunday at the library working on it, but an impromptu beer pong tournament broke out at your house on Saturday night and you were so busy eating Oreo Cakesters and chugging Vitaminwater that the entire day passed you by. Now it’s crunch time and you have no choice but to bang it out.

You decide not to waste any time, so you skip the long walk to the library and work at home. You tell your roommates not to bother you, lock the door to your room and settle in for some serious paper writing.

Only your desk is really messy. You can’t focus when you don’t even have space to spread out your books. So you clean it. Twenty minutes and a garbage can full of papers later, you decide to take out the trash. But before you do that, you might as well make sure there isn’t anything else that needs to be thrown away. You begin to clean your room. Once it is clean, you tell yourself, you will be able to focus.

As you pick up the pile of clothes next to your bed, though, you find your camera and are soon sitting on the bed flipping through photos from Saturday night. There are some real doozies on there and you have to share them. It won’t take long to post them on Facebook, right? You’ll just do that quickly and then get to the paper.

You load the photos online. Then you tag them. Then you caption them. Then you scroll through your newsfeed to see what everyone else is doing as you sit here on this Tiki Tuesday writing a stupid paper. You look through a few friends’ photo albums, you peruse the profile of the cute guy in one of the pictures, you message your friend asking her if he’s single.

“Sh*t,” you think to yourself. “I really have to get started on this paper.” You log off Facebook and prepare yourself to start writing.

But now you are hungry. You really didn’t eat much today, so you run downstairs to grab a bowl of cereal. As you are pouring your Frosted Mini Wheats into the bowl, your roommate walks in. You haven’t seen her all day, so you decide to eat the cereal with her quickly and then get moving on the paper.

Only it isn’t quick. You end up talking about Saturday night, the cute guy you just found on Facebook and what she should wear to the Tiki Tuesday party. Before you know it, you are up in her room rifling through her closet for the perfect “cute but not trying too hard” outfit.

Then you are on her computer looking at all the pictures you just posted.
Then you are helping her clean her room.
Then you are back in the kitchen doing all the dishes in the sink.
Then you are making coffee so you can stay up all night working on this paper.
Then you are looking for any excuse left not to sit down and write the damn thing.

By the time you actually make it back to your room, it is far too late to start writing. So you start rationalizing. “I would only get, like, a paragraph done tonight. And I work better under pressure, anyway. I’ll just skip lecture tomorrow and work on it then.”

So, you pull on apair of PJs and head to the living room to watch some TV with the girls. You still have a few days left until the paper is due. You’ll work on it tomorrow. Promise.

Yeah, we’ve all been there. In college, there is nothing quite like the last minute.