Oops I Did it Again

The beginning of the school year is like the New Year in my eyes. This is because at the start of every school year we all make little resolutions. Some people promise to themselves that they’ll get better grades this year, or they’ll try and make more friends. I always tell myself that I’m going to get my work done on time so that I’ll never be overwhelmed by overdue assignments. I have never held true to this resolution because I always end up procrastinating. Procrastination seems to affect me every single school year and no matter how bad I know it is for myself, I still do it, every single year.

Procrastination has become as much of a habit for me as biting my fingernails. Every time I bite my fingernails, I know how bad it is, yet I still do it. The same thing is happening when I procrastinate. I procrastinate assignments, knowing that it will cause anguish in the future. Pushing assignments off for long periods of time has become routine to me. Even with my mother constantly reminding me to do my work, I still seem to procrastinate for far too long. The reason procrastination is not only a mistake, but also a habit is because I seem do to it at some point in every school year.

I always seem to learn something new every time I procrastinate. My freshman year was probably the most tame for my bad habit. I procrastinated on just a few small assignments and it never really led to any trouble, until later in the year. My freshman year is when I learned about instant gratification vs delayed gratification. Instant gratification being when I would play video games over doing homework and delayed gratification being the opposite. I did not realize I had learned this lesson until the end of the year, after assignments piled up. This is when I wished I had done my work instead. Sophomore year I realized that procrastination affected sports. Finally, I was receiving enough work to put me behind pace if I procrastinated. This meant that I would not be able to play sports. Junior year taught me about how procrastination could lead to immense stress for myself. Putting stuff off for so long led me to be overwhelmed with work and would cause lots of stress. The lessons I learned about procrastination in the past three years are valuable to me despite the struggles I went through.

Procrastinating is something that most high school students do. It isn’t uncommon or rare by any means. In any given classroom, there are multiple students who are procrastinating something at the moment or have procrastinated in the past. I have learned a lot about procrastination and how it affects me. Using what I have learned about my mistakes in the past, I hope to better myself this school year by avoiding those same mistakes.