Everyone does it, including you. You have things to do, important things or mundane things,
and you put off doing them until the last minute. If Procrastination were an Olympic event you
might be in the running for a gold medal, youre that good at it. You make jokes about being a
world class procrastinator with your friends, telling them that sure, you could finish that project
right now if you wanted to but (yawn) youre just going to do it tomorrow.
Procrastination is putting something off until later, either due to carelessness or habitual
laziness. Its putting off till tomorrow what you just as easily could have finished up today. A
procrastinator postpones or needlessly delays accomplishing something just because.
Students are notorious for engaging in this behavior. Papers need to be researched and
written, tests must be studied for but none of this is done or even started until the very last
minute. Students who procrastinate generally spend a great deal of time pulling all nighters in
order to catch up to where they need to be or to cram for the big test in the morning.
A person who is habitually late to everything, from weddings to dates, is someone who
procrastinates getting ready to leave. Maybe they dont start getting ready until its nearly time
to leave or they move so slowly that by the time they should leave for the event, theyre still
way behind schedule.
Why do we let things slide until were in a time crunch and the deadline is looming and were
not even CLOSE to being finished? Why do we procrastinate?