I’ll Just Do It Tomorrow NOW
It’s Thursday night. You have a
four-page history paper due tomorrow, and you don’t have as much as a topic
yet. How did all of this work get piled up until the last night before
it’s due? You even told yourself it would be different this time.
It’s not like you planned to start this paper the night before it’s due.
Procrastination is a black hole, and we’re all guilty of it. There’s just
something challenging about starting and completing a task that doesn’t have a
due date in our immediate future.
You told yourself you would work on your paper
on Monday night. But after work, three classes, and an advising
appointment, you were exhausted. The last thing you wanted to be thinking
about, much less concentrating on, was a history paper due all the way at the
end of the week. Football was on, all of your friends were at your house,
and so you told yourself, “I’ll just do it tomorrow.” Instead of getting
a little bit of it done on Tuesday, you got peer pressured into going to eat
dinner with your room mates in Market Square. You knew at the time it
would be detrimental to your paper, but since it wasn’t due the next day you
told yourself, “I’ll just do it tomorrow.” Well, now it’s
Wednesday. You need to get half of this paper knocked out. You even
woke up and wrote a reminder about the paper on your palm in pen to make sure
you remembered. You tackled your responsibilities and tasks for the day,
got your favorite meal from Chick-Fil-A, and started setting up your
workspace. All of a sudden, your phone buzzed. It was the boy/girl
you have a huge crush on, and he/she wants to hang out right now. So
again, you put the paper off yet another day and told yourself, “I’ll just do
it tomorrow.”
How do you stop procrastination? It's
inevitable. After all, we are human. Recently, I have been trying
to use the two-minute rule as much as I can to beat procrastination. The
two minute rule dictates that if you have a task that will take less than two
minutes to complete, get it done right away. Not tomorrow. Not in
an hour. NOW. This rule can be applied to almost every aspect of
your life - not just school. Let's say you are reading a news article
about a certain NFL player whose recent domestic abuse video went viral.
You think to yourself, "I wonder where he played football in
college?" Look it up NOW. If you don't do it right now, you
never will. That's the power of procrastination. Your mind tells
you to finish reading the article and you tell yourself you'll just look it up
later. Trust me, you won't.
It's not so much about the amount of progress
you need to make on things you procrastinate with, but rather just getting
started. Getting started is the hardest part. Let's go back to your
history paper. Once you sit down to write it, you realize that it isn't
half as bad as you thought it was going to be. You soon realize the main
obstacle you faced when putting off this paper was just sitting down to open a
word document and put your name at the top. You viewed this paper as a
daunting task. Something that would take a long time, and something that
you have no interest in doing in the first place. But even if you had
written one or two sentences on Monday night, you would have been in a better
position. After the start, everything is smooth sailing from there.
That is not to say your paper is any easier to complete, but at least you get
your foot in the door. It's that much less you have to do the next time
you want to work on the paper.
We're all college students, and we all have
too many things to do within the mere 24 hours we have. Instead of
waiting until the ten minutes before class to print your assignment, print it
now. Instead of waiting until the night before to study for an exam, start
studying now. Instead of putting everything off for tomorrow, do it NOW.
You have 120 seconds to start something. Go
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