Procrastination

The topic of this week’s post is on procrastination. Dictionary.com defines procrastination as, “the act or habit of procrastinating, or putting off or delaying, especially something requiring immediate attention”. For those who don’t know, I have recently finished my graduate program receiving my Master’s in Social Work. Throughout my time within the program, I’ve had many instances where I had to deal with procrastinating. Everyone procrastinates for different reasons. My reasons were that I was dealing with work burnout (towards the end of the program) and a terrible work-life balance. Because of this, I was often forced into doing homework late into the night to try to send it in on time or a couple of hours late. Thankfully my procrastination did not put too much of a damper on my educational journey as I was able to finish my program within the suggested time frame. However, for others, they may not have the same luck.

As I stated, in my experience work burnout and terrible work-life balance led to my procrastination. I’ve discussed both of these instances in previous posts but for the sake of this entry, I will discuss them a little more. Towards the end of my program, I’ve begun to feel burnt out due to all the work I was doing at the time. If you’ve been living under a rock there is currently a global pandemic and while other companies may have limited services or completely shut down, I was still working and going into work from time to time. On top of that, I was enrolled full-time in school, and I had an internship that was going to 10-14 hours a week. At this point, I should have been used to the workload however, I believe, due to the pandemic I was under more stress that I wasn’t prepared for. This caused me to make decisions on whether or not I would do my work now or later and often I opted to do the work later so I could get a couple of extra hours of rest. This is also a perfect example of a terrible work-life balance. Everything was very compact towards the end of my program, so I felt like I was always playing catch-up with more work being added on. Add the stress of the world on top of that and all I wanted to do was sleep. But I was able to get myself together enough to pull through.

For others, their reasons may be different. According to a post on solvingprocrastination.com, there are a multitude of reasons that someone may procrastinate. For the sake of this post, I’m going to choose two that I feel may be the biggest reasons behind a person putting off their work for later. One of the first reasons that they identify is that if a person’s goals are too abstract. They use the scenario of someone stating that they would like to get fit. Because the goal is so abstract, the person may not know exactly where or how to start which would lead to procrastination. If the goal was a little more specific or planned out, then it would increase the chance for the goal to be acted upon and eventually achieved. Another reason they list is due to general anxiety. This is another subject that I’ve discussed in the past as well but due to feelings of anxiousness about the task at hand, it may cause someone to delay what they need to complete.

Now in my experience dealing with procrastination is a daily process. I have to actively work on it each day so that what needs to be done is done. However, according to the Solving Procrastination website, there is a 4-step plan to address your procrastination and I am inclined to agree with it. The first step is to establish our goals. Not a vague or abstract goal but a goal that you can see yourself accomplishing and is clear enough to be worked on. The next step is to determine exactly why you’ve been procrastinating. As I stated earlier, procrastination for everyone is different. For me, it was because I felt burnt out and a terrible balance of all my tasks however for you it may be different. Once you identify it then the next step is to create a plan of action to address the problem. For me, it was to start keeping a calendar that lists everything that I’ve done and what I need to do. Seeing it in front of me daily keeps me on task for the week. Lastly, it’s to implement the action plan so that you can keep yourself on task with minimal hiccups.

Hopefully, this post has provided insight into your issues regarding procrastination. If you have any feedback or general comments please feel free to reach out to me. Otherwise, I hope you achieve all your goals for the upcoming year and years to come.