Procrastination

Definition

Procrastination is defined as avoiding revision or coursework by any means possible.

The common forms are primarily Facebook and YouTube, but this can expand into watching random programmes on iPlayer or playing games on a certain not-so-popular-anymore games console (not mentioning names). Or they might even write a blog which no one will read.

If one is feeling energetic, they might venture from their rooms for a walk around campus, and to buy supplies from the shop. Or a spontaneous outing to Nando's with a group of friends might be on the cards, followed by a greatly extended walk around town. Once the student has returned to their room, the time will be far too late to possibly justify doing any revision, and so will go back to Facebook, iPlayer, YouTube etc. for several hours before deciding to go to bed.

This process will be continued by all students over the next few weeks.

 

Solution?

Short answer:
There is no solution to procrastination.

There is this thing called willpower. But I don't seem to have much of that. You mustn't think about what you want to do, but about what you should be doing. You should then get to it, unlike me. I thought about getting off Facebook to get revising maths a few minutes ago, but look where that's taken me!

If you're finding it difficult to get off Facebook, there is a solution to that. If you're a Chrome user, there's an extension called Chrome Nanny; and I'm pretty sure there's a Firefox version too, though I haven't actually checked. There you can tell it what websites you want it to block, and how much time you should be allowed on it per day before it gets blocked. I've added a screenshot as well, because I can, and it's mildly amusing. Although it does block the websites, there is the slight problem of it being incredibly easy to get around. Namely, disabling the extension, changing the options, or by using Internet Explorer. But honestly, who'd want to do that last option?

Just as an endnote, I have typed the word 'procrastination' so many times now on my iPod (which I'm using to write this), that it autocompletes that word after I type 'procr'. Oh dear.

But now I've finished this, I'm going to have a sandwich, and then I will actually go and invert some matrices, or something useful.