A short note on Procrastination

Cheers to all the goals you set for yourself but broke, kudos to the late-night rush to finish the task/ assignment and never finding motivation. This piece is all about the delay, opportunity lost, harm you suffered from these actions/ inactions and the potential you wasted.

If you have been unfazed by the remaining time for your next task submission as it is weeks away but deep inside you know you will be anxious a couple of nights before the submission and are willing to pull two all-nighters to complete the task then stay assured that is a sign of procrastination. Pulling two all-nighters is not easy in itself when anxiety mounts it is difficult to focus and exponentially easy to get distracted. Hence, any task which when assigned months ago starts with the optimism of doing best but as the deadline looms the objective shifts to minimally possible, in the end being achieved by limping across the finishing line.

Procrastination is pervasive and it is almost as common as the air around us. It exists in different forms for different individuals. Procrastination comes from the Latin pro, which means forward and crastinus, which means “of tomorrow.” Not every delay in work can be characterised as procrastination but every procrastination can be positively correlated to putting off tasks.

Our love affair with the present moment is at the root of procrastination. The fact that we can be more impulsive than rational is down to our genes, which has been passed onto us through a thousand generations. And this has exacerbated in recent times with the advent of the internet and more so after we were under the clutches of smartphones. Smartphones make it hard to keep the temptation at bay, making delays more inevitable resulting in decisions taken late but in haste all due to procrastination.

Humans are flawed, one should accept their internal state of affairs and should counter the flaws. Instead of believing that procrastination is their divine right, people should acknowledge and must work towards the creation of a better environment. K

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