Flecks of Procrastination

You’re scrambling, scuffling, perspiring, palms sweaty. Your pen keeps slipping from your grasp, your hand so cramped that you feel as if it's betraying you, and the clock’s ticking seems to mock you for being up at this ungodly hour. You, too, believe the hour to be ungodly, for your eyes are red, and your shoulders feel foreign to you, and your elbows are chapped for rubbing them on your desk for so long. Your pen is running out of ink, and you feel like nothing is going well, that you might as well go to sleep: and so you do, your head clunking onto your pillow. Your biology paper should have been ready to proofread tonight, but instead the only thing you proofread was the title.

Procrastination: a word derived from the latin verb procrastinare— to put off until tomorrow. Procrastination is a mishap that almost every teenager, or even a fully-fledged adult, indulges in, when they decide that whatever that needs to be done “can wait”. Despite being a universally understood human experience, procrastination is like an oil spill in the ocean of productivity. Why do we still constantly do it? Where does this black, poisonous oil come from?

If you were to ask the average person what the root of procrastination was, they would say laziness. However, renowned psychologists Jane Burka and Lenora Yuen argue that the feeling stems from ‘fear, emotion, lack of self-esteem and perfectionism’. Many people, especially adolescents, are fearful of coming face-to-face with their pent-up tasks for they fear they may not “do well”, and therefore avoid the task completely.

Procrastination, although heavily irrational, could also be an indirect method of coping, as said by Dr. Fuschia Sirois, professor of psychology at the University of Sheffield. She states that people engage in a ‘cycle of chronic procrastination because of an inability to manage negative moods around a task’, therefore avoiding and delaying the endeavour as a way of coping with challenging emotions such as frustration and self doubt. Dr. Sirois also found that procrastination revolves around the urgency of “managing negative moods’ rather than actually committing to the task.

But what are the effects of procrastination? The most obvious one is that you lose precious time. Instead of doing the task itself, people delay it by doing other things such as stare blankly at the television or talk to their friends about how difficult the project or activity would be if they attempted it; all this fear mongering does it waste time. This, in turn, leads to missed opportunities and missed achievements regarding work, for you can’t score a goal if you don’t shoot the ball.

Procrastination is also a vicious circle which heavily lowers your self esteem. Like little miners excavating the cave that is your confidence, procrastination forces you to ask yourself ‘Why don’t I just do it?’, which typically leads to seeing yourself in a lower light. Lowered self esteem can lead us to believe we aren’t doing the task because we aren’t capable of it- although this is not a case of can and cannot. Lastly, procrastination will hurt you. Instead of doing the project or task itself, your delaying, neglecting, and dismissing will only come back in the future to haunt you, like unwashed laundry. Rather than doing the one task itself, when you allow all your responsibilities to build up, it can tumble into one huge laundry ball and become an overwhelming monster, yielding only temporary relief at the expense of your future time. “It’s self-harm” says Dr. Piers Steel, a professor of motivational psychology at the University of Calgary.

Hong Kong, like many other nations where pressure is high regarding education, has a prevalent and serious case of procrastination among its youth. This is largely due to the fact that the external pressure students face, perhaps from parents or teachers, can unravel into a situation where standards are unrealistically high. All these unfeasible expectations have created is a stiff and unwelcoming environment where students feel like they cannot grow in their own space, and instead crawl into the soothing embrace of procrastination.

But such escape is not limited to the adolescent community: since many of us in Hong Kong possess busy lives, we all tend to want to “maximise” our time to indulge in activities we find enjoyable, instead of coming to terms with our harsh, unpleasant reality. Honestly, who would actually prefer to prepare biology notes when you could go outside for a walk instead? it's almost as if it's strange to find someone not procrastinating…

And now for the question we’ve all been waiting for: how to deal with it. Dr. Michael Eason, a psychologist based in Hong Kong, advises us to the three things: organise yourself, shift your perspective, and practice. Organising and setting out your necessary tasks with something as simple as a checklist will allow your tasks to not only become more tangible and appear manageable, but also gives you the satisfaction of putting a little tick next to it. Thinking of how good it will be to get the task done is also another satisfying thought, with the last point of advice in ingraining the task itself, such as chores, to a daily routine, another thing which also proves essential to saving yourself from the sin we call procrastination. Although Dr. Eason says it is “incredibly easy” to get caught up in the spiralling motion of delaying your tasks, just remember that no matter how jarring, scary and unappealing your work is; it is necessary.