I am a chronic procrastinator. I’m not sure when it started, but sometime in high school, I started putting things off until the last minute, and it turned into a snowball effect. I found myself in an unending loop of procrastinating and then getting mad at myself for procrastinating, promising myself that I would be on top of my work next time, only for the cycle to start all over again.
Something that I’ve learned recently, however, is that beating yourself up over doing things other than homework can be even less productive. It perpetuates the mindset that if you are procrastinating and not doing your work, then you’re lazy and useless. But that shouldn’t be the case. Our society is so obsessed with “hustle culture” that it’s become the norm to never take a break from homework and to ignore other responsibilities just to get a little bit ahead in your schoolwork.
This isn’t healthy. Of course, taking too much time for yourself is also a slippery slope that I’ve been down many times before, laying in bed all day watching Netflix and ignoring every single responsibility that I have. So the question becomes where to find a happy medium.
Enter: productive procrastination. Productive procrastination is when you still put off important tasks by doing other important things that might not be as pressing. For example, putting off a paper you have to write in order to do laundry or clean your room. I believe that productive procrastination is the key to being more efficient with your work hours while also not withering away from the detrimental effects of hustle culture.
When you finish one thing on your school to-do list, I recommend that you try to do something that is still productive but not necessarily something that is school-related or will have you hunched over your computer for another half hour. I’ve been going on a lot of walks in between doing school work, which I’ve found is a great way to get moving and be semi-active while also taking a break from staring at my computer screen and thinking about school work. Another form of productive procrastination that you could try is taking a moment to check in with a friend or family member or even something like doing the dishes or cleaning your room.
I’ve found that when I take a break from schoolwork and do something else, when I come back to my schoolwork, it feels like my brain has been reset and I’m more effective and efficient than I would have been had I never taken that break. There’s also something so satisfying to me about looking back on your day and realizing that you’ve gotten so much done, even if it did mean that you put off writing a paper for a little bit.
By alternating between a school related task and a non-school related task that still needs to be done, you could be saving yourself from working yourself into the ground trying to keep up with the hyper-productive world. Productivity isn’t a tangible thing, it’s a mindset, and it’s time that we start thinking about it in terms of the broader world, not just the smaller bubble of schoolwork.