Procrastination at IMSA

It’s 12 AM, and you’re just starting your long-dreaded math homework. Facebook, the first stage of procrastination, is ever-so-tempting because you’re attempting to ignore the impending responsibility. And now you’re thinking that maybe, just maybe, you should’ve started this homework hours ago.

And then the cycle repeats the next day.

Procrastination seems to be a really big problem here at IMSA. I sometimes even find myself waiting until the 10 minutes before class starts to complete an assignment. The fact that this happens more often than it should makes me wonder whether I enjoy feeling rushed and panicked to finish something before it’s due, or if the atmosphere here makes me truly believe that waiting until the last minute is completely okay and actually shows how efficient you can be.

If you think about it, it’s really easy to procrastinate here at IMSA, because everyone does it. You hear things like, “Let’s go play League, we can start our homework right after,” or “It’ll just take half an hour, then you can do your homework.” But half an hour turns into an hour, then into 2, then into 5, and soon you realize that it’s past midnight, and your homework will take you more than just an hour to complete. Living around such a diverse group of people makes it hard to focus on what you, yourself, need to get done, because everyone is doing different things at different times. There are those people who get their homework done before dinner and are free to hang out the rest of the day, those people who start their homework at 7pm and finish before 11pm, and then those people who don’t even start their homework until 1am.

It isn’t even as though all of your friends all do the same thing and start their homework at the same time, so sometimes choosing who you want to hang out with is part of deciding when you want to start your homework.

And, being that friends and homework are both important aspects of IMSA as a whole, having to make that decision is unfair.

My point is that procrastination here is either a really big problem that spreads like the flu, or it’s just something that’s part of life at IMSA because of the busy and clustered atmosphere. Living and studying at a residential school, it’s often hard to just sit down and concentrate. I used to think that procrastination was when you put something that needs to get done off to the side for later, but at IMSA it seems to just be the process of actually getting work done. Everyone brushes their teeth, right? So by the same reasoning, almost everyone procrastinates, and it’s just a part of life at IMSA now.