Freedom from procrastination

Last week before we left home for break, I’m sure that many of you did what I did: made a list. Whether it be written down or in your mind, you made a list of things to get done while on break so that when you returned to school, you would have less things to worry about. If you’re like me, however, that list, well-intentioned as it was, did not get completed. I had plenty of time to finish everything and more and then have time to do whatever I wanted, but I only managed to get a fraction of my work done. Instead, I waited until Sunday night before class and stayed up until 4 a.m. finishing everything. Lately it seems, I have made this sort of behavior a common practice.

Two weeks ago, to force myself to finish a paper at a reasonable hour, I resorted to unplugging my cable connection so that I wouldn’t be tempted to watch television. This seems to be the root of my, and other’s, problems with procrastination; not only TV though— Internet, cell phones and video games too. After reading several articles discussing procrastination, they all seem to suggest that now, more than ever, it is more difficult to overcome procrastination. Now, you can check your e-mails, check Facebook, check your Twitter account, go to your favorite site, watch videos on Youtube, play some video games (darn you Black Ops!) and watch some television while your 10-page research paper sits unwritten.

Thankfully, though, an application called Freedom is available. It allows you to disable the Internet for a specified amount of time. There is no override feature that lets you type in a password to regain access; the only way to regain access to the Internet is to wait out the time period or to reboot the computer! Quite the deterrent. But, alas, the application costs $10 to download; however there is a free trial version, and I’m sure there is some freeware that performs the same task.

However you look at it, it seems, for me at least, that procrastination has become very difficult to deal with. In addition, I agree that technology has created many more distractions, and that it is probably exacerbating the problem of procrastination, making it a real problem. In fact, as I wrote this column, I tried so hard to avoid the Internet. And I still went on Facebook anyways! I haven’t had any missed papers or have had anything affected because of my tardy behavior, so I don’t consider it to be too serious, but if your procrastination has affected your life negatively, consider programs like Freedom or unplugging some devices.

Posted by Alex Smith on Dec 2 2010. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.