Is Procrastination Really Such A Bad Habit?

Perhaps the most amazing and unrecognized—and certainly unofficial—of college students’ academic feats is the ability to complete an assignment at record pace. A 10-page paper? Done in two hours. Earning an A after a full night of review for that test? Actually, it was  a full hour of review. Teachers and parents will forever lament this bad practice of procrastination. But is it such a problem?

You’ll never find a universal answer to that. However, procrastination, a college habit of which we’re all guilty at times, could have its benefits. Firstly, however, any benefits seem slim when compared to the advantages of not procrastinating: getting work done at a steady pace will allow you to think carefully, plan out your completion of an assignment, and review your progress at the end—a procrastinated assignment allows for none of this. But it’s now Sunday night, and that big project is due Monday morning—let’s look on the bright side, if there is one.

Procrastination offers little choice: you have to concentrate on your work. Between checking your email and checking your cellphone, there are enough distractions to keep your mind off your work on any given night. Those tempting distractors will hold a lot less sway when you’re on a tight deadline; procrastination forces you to concentrate on the task at hand, and sometimes great work is the result.

Working under pressure, while never exactly pleasant, is a good skill to have. College life and academics offer plenty of pressure, but so can the workplace. When you’re out of school and on the job, there will be more to learn and new pressures to settle with. Hopefully you’ll take a more active approach to work when entering the working world, but at least you’ll have had experience working under time pressure, a job skill that can even be carefully applied to a resume.

Procrastination also develops your on-the-fly critical thinking. If the sun’s creeping up and that 10-page paper still doesn’t have a theme to it, it’s time for some speedy critical thinking. Perhaps you’ll come up with just as good an idea as if you had weeks to plan—consider yourself one gifted procrastinator if that’s the case. If you can still produce acceptable work at that pace, not only can you think quickly, but your results aren’t half bad either. This is the type of skill that can’t hurt to develop, but it’s also one that shouldn’t be your focus. Knowing you can complete an assignment in a time crunch is a nice crutch to have, but procrastination is procrastination, and it shouldn’t be your go-to method for schoolwork.

The most important thing to learn is how to better plan your time so you don’t end up procrastinating every assignment. Alas, that’s easier said than done; procrastinators don’t plan very well, now do they. Procrastination will happen, but try and keep it to a minimum. When it sets in, though, just think, working well at that pace is a skill, a skill that’s even worth taking some time to hone.