With the semester quickly coming to an end and finals week approaching, it’s once again the time of year for everyone to start procrastinating.
If you tell yourself you’re going to begin studying at 7 p.m., at the very best you’ll probably start at 9.
Whether it’s reading, reviewing or researching something, there’s so many distractions that you just can’t help but give in, especially when a computer is involved.
You use it everyday for Facebook, iTunes, YouTube, Chatroullette (if you’re into that kind of thing) and Google. It gives you the ability to look up anything you could ever imagine. But now you have to use it for work.
You turn on the computer and figure, before you start studying you might as well get any distractions out of the way, which means checking your Facebook and email.
You log on to Facebook to see that an old friend from home liked one of your recent statuses.
You might as well return the favor by writing on their wall: “Yo! Can’t wait to rage with you over winter break. It’s been so long, bro!” (If you’re a girl, it will look more like, “OMG! Hey! I can’t wait to get home for break and see your face!!! P.S. You look gorgeous in your profile pic!! Miss ya!! XOXO.”)
Instead of logging off right then like you know you should, you decide to look at all the photos of the friend you haven’t seen in a while, so that the next thing you know you have viewed 545 of their 550 pictures.
You feel weird and uncomfortable for having gone through so many of this person’s pictures, like you’ve just done something wrong.
You promise yourself, “Okay, I’m just going to check my email, then get to studying.” You check your email and find nothing really important.
Except, of course, your reminder that Ultra Fest tickets are now on sale, which prompts you to click on the link to the website.
You tell yourself you’re only going to check the line up, but once on the Ultra site, you realize you haven’t listened to any of the new albums from these DJs, so you head over to YouTube to listen to a few songs “real quick.”
Of course, this turns into a 45 minute personal rave in your room. It’s now been a solid hour of not studying, but before you leave YouTube, you notice one of the videos on the sidebar called “funny cats” that you can’t help but watch it.
After that, you finally end up studying for about an hour. Even though the ratio of not studying to studying time in that scenario is only 1:1, it still goes down as a successful study session in your opinion.
If your studying doesn’t involve a computer, your distractions have to be more creative.
If you tell yourself you’re going to start reviewing at 4 p.m., when that time comes, you’ll realize it’s still sunny outside and something about sitting indoors reading while the sun is still out bothers you, so you move your start time to 6 p.m.
Eventually six comes around, but at this point you realize you’re pretty hungry, and you know you can’t focus when you’re hungry, so you make a quick run to McDonald’s.
Half an hour later, as you’re getting ready to sit down and start studying, you notice you haven’t done laundry in the last three weeks (or months depending on how cool you are) and you can’t be studying with all these dirty clothes everywhere, so you get everything together and start a load.
Since you’re already doing laundry, you figure you might as well clean your whole room, so you spend the next hour making your room look perfect.
After you’re exhausted from all the cleaning and preparation you’ve been doing, you give up on the idea of studying at all for now.
You know it will be easy to study later, since your room will be perfectly clean and you won’t have any dirty clothes lying around. Plus, you’re not even taking the exam for another few hours anyway, so why rush and do all the studying now?
There were a few more procrastination scenarios I was going to talk about, and a pretty solid conclusion to the story I was going to put in, but I never got around to doing it.
Have a good break everyone!
John Jacobs can be reached at jjacobs@spartans.ut.edu.