Procrastination.....

As students we try to keep a balance between our academic and social life. Every day you tend to hear people say, "I'm normally free but I've a back log of work" or "I'm so stressed! I've 4 assignments due in on Friday!". You start thinking to yourself, isn't it obvious that you clearly need to do some work? Yes. So why do people put off work? Would you consider them as being lazy for not doing it when they should have done or is it having bad organizational skills?

Here are what Dr. Ferrari, an associate professor of psychology at De Paul University in Chicago Psychology doctors have said about the subject:

Procrastination is not a problem of time management or of planning. Procrastinators are not different in their ability to estimate time, although they are more optimistic than others. "Telling someone who procrastinates to buy a weekly planner is like telling someone with chronic depression to just cheer up,". So really, time management is not the problem. So what is? Why do we procrastinate?

There's more than one flavor of procrastination. People procrastinate for different reasons. Dr. Ferrari identifies three basic types of procrastinators:

• arousal types, or thrill-seekers, who wait to the last minute for the euphoric rush.
• avoiders, who may be avoiding fear of failure or even fear of success, but in either case are very concerned with what others think of them; they would rather have others think they lack effort than ability.
• decisional procrastinators, who cannot make a decision. Not making a decision absolves procrastinators of responsibility for the outcome of events.

So is it that procrastinators take time to do things because of the above-mentioned 'flavours' are Dr. Ferrari gives us? Other articles seem to agree. I have friends who are arousal types - can only focus when the deadline is absolutely tight, thus doing things last minute. Though, their reason is because they can only focus then as there is a need to do work, other times, they don't feel the pressure. This, funnily enough, is called the Student Syndrome(Eliyahu G., 1997).

On the other hand, could we argue that a little procrastination is good for us? After all, we do need that extra factor to get us going!