I’m a Graduate Student. Why Am I Still Waiting Until the Due Date to Start My Essays?
By: H. M. Johnson
Tags: Humor, Students, Writing, Procrastination

Photo by Andrew Neel from Pexels

I’m a Graduate Student. Why Am I Still Waiting Until the Due Date to Start My Essays?

In everyday life, I am not a procrastinator.

A typical day for me includes a little bit of tidying up my apartment, getting to work early, and cooking dinner at the same time. I find time to write in between my daily work schedule and my tutoring schedule, even striving to wake up early each day just to get some extra writing in. When I don’t have any assigned responsibilities, I assign them to myself and make sure that my novel receives the 1,600 words per day that it deserves.

When it comes to schoolwork, I cannot say the same thing. No matter how old I grow and how much more responsibility I accept, I still seem to find myself waiting until the day-before or day-of my deadlines to complete my academic work. In fact, as I write this, I am supposed to be writing a paper that is due tomorrow at midnight.

Why am I such a responsible person except for when it comes to the most integral aspect of this time in my life?

It’s not as though I haven’t already planned out the essay and concocted my list of scholarly articles to use for this analysis of methodology I’ve been assigned. I have a plan and I’m ready to write it — I just won’t do it until I can begin to feel my skin crawl with tension and the ticking of the clock intensifying.

Over the years, I’ve learned that some of my best work is produced when I am under pressure. In the entirety of my five years learning at the college level, I have never written a paper once gradually over time and instead have always opted to save my work for the last minute. I faithfully believe in my ability to produce quality work under a time crunch and know that I will successfully meet all of the criteria I’m supposed to when the anxiety hits.

Isn’t that the problem with procrastination, though? The anxiety that it causes is often so stressful that it stifles us. Would I write better if I didn’t have a deadline? I was made aware of the due date of this paper roughly six weeks ago!

Fellow procrastinators, I believe that if we didn’t have a deadline then the work would never get done. If we didn’t subject ourselves to the variable fear and anxiety of closeness to the due-date, pure intimacy with the possibility of failure, we would not produce any work at all. It’s just the way that we are.

Am I going to be this way forever? Are you going to be this way forever?

Probably.

I’m working on a Masters degree and I still can’t seem to stop acting out like this when it comes to my studies, even amidst being a shining example of adulthood when it comes to everything else.

Maybe the answer is to simply stop bullying ourselves for being procrastinators. There’s a stigma to procrastinating that I know I don’t appreciate, and you probably don’t, either.

As long as the paper is getting done efficiently and correctly within excellent standards, does it really matter whether it was written over two weeks or over two hours?

No.

This is the system that works for me and if it works for you too, then relax, kick back, and remember: sometimes that saying about the journey being more important than the destination is nonsense.