Put off procrastination

By: The Traveler Editorial Board

Posted: 11/24/08

Thanksgiving break - that much-heralded and long-awaited respite from classes and other obligations - approaches, and the intention of many is to relax wholeheartedly for the five-day vacation. Such an intention is understandable given the 12-week uninterrupted stretch of compulsory class attendance students have endured.

Should students decide to completely ignore their school-related responsibilities over this extended weekend, however, the break might morph into punishment - albeit a punishment students won't recognize until they return to school next week.

Procrastination is "a behavior that most, if not all, college students fall prey to," according to an article in the June 1999 issue of the Journal of Young Investigators. Rates of procrastination among college students average about a startling 70 percent, according to researcher Noran Fauziah Yaakub.

An already too-common tendency, procrastination is never more tempting than during a vacation.

Five days seems like an ample amount of time to both "veg" out and complete any homework professors might have been so insensitive as to assign. Five days even seems to contain in its promise the opportunity to at last gain an edge in the quest to conquer final projects and exams. The reality is, though, that five days is not enough time to do nothing for five days and still return to school "ahead."

Viewing a vacation as more than enough time to do everything and nothing is a classic example of the "planning fallacy" - the consistent underestimation of the time needed to complete something and a common cause of procrastination. Procrastination, in turn, compounds stress levels and is correlated with several health problems, including anxiety and depression, according to the JYI article.

Procrastination is also "a way for us to be satisfied with second-rate results," according to psychotherapist Richard O'Connor, because "we can always tell ourselves we'd have done a better job if only we'd had more time." Furthermore, research shows that the negative effects of procrastination on health and anxiety levels increase toward the end of a semester - more reason to not rule out work over the break.

While Thanksgiving break is delightful in its own right, it is still merely a tease, and students should remind themselves that school will only intensify in the few, short days between this holiday and the next and prepare accordingly, unless they wish to be blindsided by the workload they failed to acknowledge during their retreat into home comfort.

The sacrifice of at least a couple of lazy days on the altar of schoolwork this Thanksgiving weekend is sensible, however much it might strike students as undesirable.