Flickr / Alex The Shutter
Cason Ragland
Staff Writer
Planning essays is for dorks and nerds and even if I did plan this essay out then I would’ve been very hasty about it. I didn’t think twice about my thesis and to be honest I don’t think I really need to. By the end of any semester I’m always certain that procrastination is my most well executed and useful technique.
Procrastination is the anchor to my ship in the sea of academia. The waves of assignments toss me around but I stay safe. When it is time to depart, I raise the anchor and set sail on my quest for knowledge. With new found strength in the calm waters, I’m able to do anything. I’m proud of being a cool dude who’s setting sail on an odyssey that will rival “The Odyssey.” Through procrastination, I can survive storm of my anxieties and discover their true strength as a student and as a member of society.
Putting off your work gives you the extra time you need to heighten your scholarly senses. Imagine if you completed a paper or online quiz as soon as it was assigned to you. How could you even begin to start? You’d be far too relaxed and nonchalant. The only way to get past these emotional hurdles would be to wait until the very last moment to do your work.
In spite of all the benefits of procrastination, some might argue that there are limits to what it can do for us. Let’s say you’re really trying to make your parents proud so you decide to study medieval history. You head up to the rare books collection in the library and find the manuscript you’re looking for. But dang! It’s practically written in cipher! Did the guys who write these even want to get published? Or did they just put all their effort into writing the first letters of every chapter much larger than the others. How could they waste so much time on just one letter? They had a whole book to write after all. The lesson you can learn from the monks is that if you’re going to do your work, do it as quickly as possible.
Assignments take hard work and there’s no better way to work hard than to give yourself as little time as possible to complete the task. It’s just mathematics if you really wanna know. You simply work 10 times as hard in a tenth of the time between when an assignment is given and when it is due. Your effort will show in whatever product of comprehension you choose to create.
I’ve written about it before, but total transparency is crucial to personal relations. In what I call “the zone,” your execution may stagnate a bit, but your professor will simply take you as a pursuer of understanding. A pilgrim on a journey to a town called Accomplishment. However, they will only truly empathize with you if you enter “the zone” with perfect courage. Otherwise, it will utterly annihilate your soul.
The benefits of procrastination can help all aspects of your life, not just in the classroom. Imagine all the time you have when you’re not just doing homework. You could start meditating, you could write a book of free verse poems, or just kinda sit around and mull things over. Slowly, but surely, your body will be preparing itself to enter “the zone”. Through this preparation, you’ll be able to do the things you always do. Things like hang out with friends or tell your friends that you’d like to hang out and then stay at home instead. The things you can do with you time when you’re not completing your school work are endless.
Since you’re reading this, I assume you probably have something better to do. Therefore, you’ve already taken my sage advice and I just want to congratulate you. This is the greatest decision you’ve ever made and I can’t praise you enough. Not only will you have time to do the things you love but you’ll also be working harder than anyone else at your university. Putting things off really is the gift that keeps on giving.
THE CAROLINIAN 
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