Understanding Laziness and Procrastinator Lifestyle

Have you ever experienced this urge of delaying, postponing or even avoiding tasks that don’t require your urgent attention like studying for a test or working on an assignment even though you have a very tight schedule and these tasks will be a major hindrance later on for you if you don't complete them? Even with knowing all that, you can’t help but play games, watch YouTube or Netflix videos or just browse through social media. Well if you have, welcome to the world of procrastination. It’s a world filled with the feeling the good-old feelings of depression, anxiety, and stress that I’m sure we all love to experience, don’t we? Most of us are familiar with this procrastination world and come to visit it every so often but there’s a small group of people known as chronic procrastinators by a small number, I mean 1 person in every five people! These people have made this procrastinator world their home as they start to stay there longer and longer, these are the masters of procrastination and have earned the title known as the procrastinator. I like the way procrastination researcher Joseph Ferrari put it, “Everyone procrastinates, but not everyone is a procrastinator.” and today I want to explore this procrastinator lifestyle and the science behind it and what are some ways to contain its effect or stop it altogether?

I know most non-procrastinators think procrastinators are just a bunch of lazy slackers but I assure you from my personal experience that is the farthest thing from the truth. It’s only on the surface that laziness and procrastination appear to be similar but in fact, both of these habits are completely different from each other. I don't know why I am defining it but laziness basically refers to the unwillingness to complete a task because of the effort involved but procrastination is putting off a difficult and stressful task and deliberately avoiding it. Why do procrastinators avoid these you might ask, well after doing some research, I found there are actually three types of procrastination or three main reasons why a person might procrastinate.

The first reason is that that some people find certain pieces of work to be tedious and boring so these procrastinations deliberately look for distractions so they would rather do anything but that dreaded task. Let me give you an example, I don’t hate art but I am not the best at it so whenever we get an art project in Mrs.Wiles’s class, I’m always one of the few who never finishes on the deadline as I find drawing to be pretty difficult at times so I unintentionally avoid working on art in an art class.

The second reason behind procrastination is a phenomenon known as “Plenty of time”. What it means is that whenever a deadline is far, people believe that they have all the time in the world so they can’t muster up enough productivity to even start a project let alone finish it. Since I’m a big victim of this procrastination. I have a lot of experiences I can share with you guys like the one related to the last novel study we received, I finished my book quite early and I knew that I had to spread out my work as I didn’t want myself to be under stress of completing all the work in one day so several weeks before the due date, I forced myself to just sit down and start working on the book report. I remember that almost an hour had passed but there was still a blank sheet staring right back at me with just a name on it. While I was to busy contemplating over topics like what is the meaning of life or what is consciousness but even those subjects became too much work to consider so instead they turned into thinking about what came first, the chicken or the egg or do we eat to live or live to eat? Even though I had just wasted several hours like this over the course of many days, I was unconcerned and felt relaxed as I knew in the back of my mind that I had still had a ton of time but the problem with this procrastination is that you kept delaying the task so much and before you know it you have one day left, now I think about it that’s the problem with any types of procrastination. So I did the only possible thing I could, I wrote 10 pages or 5000 words under 24 hours and when I say 24 hours, I’m not exaggerating, I had to stay up and pull an all-nighter. Trust me, not fun! Not fun at all.

Last motivation behind procrastination is what’s known as “Perfectionist procrastination”. You see, perfectionists are people who have excessively high-performance expectations for themselves, they also want their work to be flawless and as close to perfection as it possibly can. For some perfectionists, when you give them a task, the fear of failing and not meeting their expectations can cause them to feel over-stressed and overwhelmed. As a result, they get too afraid to start a task until they are forced to do it and have no more choice. I don’t experience “Perfectionist procrastination” much often but the one time I prominently remember experiencing it was when we were writing our speeches. My topic was water scarcity and I wanted to do write a good speech that will raise awareness about the issue. So, when I got around to actually writing it, I was so afraid that I might write a disastrous speech so I kept putting off till tomorrow until I had 4 days before the deadline. As you already might have noticed that even one person like myself can still three types of procrastination.

Being a procrastinator is something I don’t necessarily hate but it’s definitely not something I enjoy as procrastination can make you “feel like a spectator, at times” in your own life as the blogger, Tim Urban put it best. It can also be the main source of stress and frustration as “You know what you ought to do and you’re not able to bring yourself to do it. It’s that gap between intention and action.”