Factors Of Procrastination And Ways To Overcome It

A famous author by the name of Benjamin Franklin once said, “You may delay, but time will not, and lost time is never found again.” Good morning to Miss Shivani and my fellow friends, today I will talk about procrastination. Nowadays, procrastination has become a common phenomenon among people and people often joke about it. People always say: “I will do it tomorrow.” But the next day they say the same thing too. So why does this happen? This is all due to procrastinating. For some reason, procrastinating feels good for a little bit, however it is a very destructive habit. Procrastination can be defined as the action of delaying or postponing a task. It is very harmful and may bring many bad effects.

Have you ever felt regret, irritation, depression or a low self-esteem after having put off the work that you know you should be doing but aren’t? or have you felt these feelings as you are doing that work at a later date? These are the feelings of procrastination according to a study done by the man, Eun Hee. According to Psychology Today, there are approximately 20 percent of people are chronic procrastinators, for them the behavior cuts across all domains of life. There is not just one type of procrastination, the first one is thrill-seekers, this group tend to wait until the last minute to start the work. The second type is avoiders, they put off tasks because they are fear to fail. Then there are decisional procrastinators, who are unable to make a decision. However, there are a big cost to procrastination. The first one is we will lose precious time. While we procrastinate, we are wasting time. Next, we will miss out opportunities. When they were opportunities, instead of grabbing it, we procrastinate, thinking that maybe we can grab it later. At last, we miss it. Furthermore, we won’t be able to meet goals. This is because we just could not take our first step to start working on our goals. Some of you may argue that procrastination is good, however procrastinate can cause mental health problems such as stress and anxiety. If we procrastinate too much with something, we will feel panic and stress.

So, what are the ways to overcome procrastination? The first one is block out the distraction such as television, smart phones, cats, foods and many more. We always get distracted by small thing, this is because we do not have strong willpower. Willpower is the motivation to exercise will. Without this power, it will be hard for us to focus on something. For instance, when you are working on your homework, try to keep your handphone away, try not to play with your cats and set a mindset by telling yourself you have to finish it today. Another way to overcome procrastination is to do work in library. This is because if we can see temptation around us, we will get distracted by them for sure and therefore procrastinate. Therefore, when we are surrounded by books and students that are working hard on their own tasks, this makes us become focus and inspire us to work hard too. The other way to stop procrastinate is to find a buddy that will company you to do the work. Having a companion makes the process more fun. This buddy has to be someone who has his or her own set of goals and they know what to do. By having a buddy like this you could be triggered and will follow their steps in order to achieve goals.

Well, I believe that if we try to adopt all these steps, we may conquer procrastination someday. Imagine this, you have tons of assignments needed to be done in one week, the first thing come in your mind is “I will do it later but not today.” Then you start browsing internet searching for some new movies to watch as you feel that you still have plenty of time to do the assignments. And then while you are watching the movie, you suddenly realized that this is wrong and the feeling of guilt, regret and depress hit you up. At this moment you need to have strong willpower and set a mindset telling yourself to do the work right now, and then you need to get up, take your things and head to the library. I believe that when you are in the library, you will eventually start to do the work. If you continue to watch movie, believe me, you will end up stressing out and hate yourself for not doing work. This may lead you to anxiety, panic and could turn into serious health issues.

In conclusion, procrastination is the thief of time and it will affect the rest of your life. Abraham Lincoln once said that, “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today”, so whatever you must do, do it now! We should never procrastinate because time will never wait for us. So, use your time wisely instead of wasting time.