Written by: Aditya Uprety - 24008, Grade XI
Posted on: 10 November, 2022
‘Procrastination’ is when someone decides to leave their tasks to their future self believing that they will do it later; but that time never comes and the work just keeps on stacking and piling up. Studies show that more or less 80%–95% of college students engage in procrastination to some degree; approximately 75% consider themselves to be procrastinators, and approximately 50% say that they procrastinate in a consistent and problematic manner. Not only in college students but this procrastination can be found in almost every age group regardless of what country they belong to. It has been a major factor in killing creativity among students and even distracting them from doing their own respective tasks. There are many factors why people are procrastinating and one of the main reasons is due to social media. People have got so much addicted to it that they just can't get over it; they just keep on scrolling the pages on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube and others, with high hopes of expectations that a better video might pop up and release a little bit of dopamine! It is not wrong to surf in social media; in fact it is a good thing, we can get news, get in touch with our friends and families and have fun watching those funny videos- all of us need these, but it gets out of our hands and turns into procrastination when we are doing it the wrong way: People neglect or postpone what they have to do in the current time, they postpone their work, they postpone their studies, their homeworks- not realizing that they are actually giving up their future, a dream that they have, just for a little enjoyment that they are expecting to find. Slowly this procrastination starts to take over our lives and everything starts to fall apart. Even after knowing the reason behind the downfall, we just don’t stop procrastinating and this exactly becomes our addiction: our nemesis!
So, what do we do? People say that they are going to leave ‘procrastinating’ from the next day and that they are going to change their mind, but that next day or the ‘tomorrow’ never comes and that exactly is procrastination. Trying to take a huge leap forward is never going to help. We should start small, like getting up early in the morning and not going straight for that smartphone beside us; we should reject the urge and do what we are supposed to be doing: probably eating our breakfasts without hanging our heads over that screen! Yes, it is going to be hard for a few days but when we complete our due tasks, a different kind of pride would certainly hit us. We would definitely realize that pride is probably not a sin, but something way better than the constant release of dopamine that we have been getting from those short clips that are perhaps not that beneficial. Slowly when we start finishing our tasks and start to see the results, we would start leaving all that ‘procrastination’ behind and get our life back on track. So the first step to stop procrastination is to take a small step and do what we need to do RIGHT AT THE MOMENT because a short conversation with the person sitting next to us could unfold so much more than just scrolling through that screen all the time… who knows, sometimes human interactions might motivate us in completing our unfinished tasks…
