Most of you have the brains to get what you want / need in the leaving cert. Some people just seem to naturally do anything they’re told… they’ll have homework done as fast as it’s given to them, they’ll attend easter revision courses and grinds classes despite the fact they’ve aced their mocks…

photo credit: The Construct Creative

For a lot of us normal people though, we suffer from this disease called ‘procrastination’. So what is it? It’s knowing you have something to do, acknowledging it has to be done and then not doing it. Grabbed straight from wikipedia, they say it “refers to the deferment of actions or tasks to a later time”.

Over the last few hours, i’ve been suffering from procrastination. I knew i had to write a blog post, i accepted i had to do it and then i just couldn’t have been arsed to do it until now. I have this stupid rule of having to blog once per day, so it’s now 11.06pm which means i have just 54 minutes to get this post published before a deadline.

And that’s how you beat procrastination – you don’t beat it at all, you just fool yourself with false deadlines or false punishments to make you work. If you have an exam next tuesday, pretend it’s next monday and prepare yourself as normal. You’re setting a ‘fake’ deadline which means that you’ve prepared yourself for a test as you normally would but when the deadline day comes, you find yourself with additional time (an added day) which allows you to cram even more stuff in to you head.

Easier said than done, i know but you can’t just take some pills for procrastination. If work needs done, work needs done. It’s as simple as that. The sooner you get started, the sooner you can finish – that’s the incentive. Usually if you’re delaying doing something it means you don’t want to do it or don’t enjoy doing it… so that’s why you’ll procrastinate when it comes to maths and not art or something like that (assuming you hate maths and like art).

Anyway, that’s my procrastination period complete for another day. I’ve published this post before my deadline which means my mind can rest and it also keeps the boss man happy (which is me).