What role does procrastination play in your life?

Monday morning, I woke up and realized I had yet again ignored all of my school responsibilities over the weekend. I came home after work on Sunday evening and tumbled down a rabbit hole lined with flickering screens. KC Undercover episodes on Disney Plus. Instagram Reels. I fell down, down, down, until I eventually slept, at 12. My Japanese homework, incomplete. My college essays still steaming heaps of word vomit if anything. I very much wanted to scream and explode and bawl my eyes out.

Procrastination often feels like an unavoidable instinct. I have an intense need to get away from the seemingly insurmountable mountain of tasks which are always ahead of me, and I can, if I do literally anything else.

It's hard to tell the exact extent to which it's present. It's sneaky. It’s a massive and vague concept that can mean so many things. Because sometimes I’m obviously avoiding impending deadlines, watching social media instead of working. But sometimes I'm not. Sometimes I’m tidying my room because I don’t think I can work in a messy space. But what if I’m just putting off writing and I should just suck it up and start?

What even is procrastination? I don’t have a clear answer, even after going to the SSO and three counselors and youtube videos, audiobooks, and podcasts to try and solve the “procrastination problem.” To figure out how to do what I need to do when I need to do it. I’ve tried blocking out time to do things, telling myself I just need to do it, to push through. Get started. Look at it for 5 minutes. None of these tools has solved the problem. I always feel like I’m avoiding the important stuff.

It's difficult, for me at least, to delineate between procrastination, prioritization, and self-preservation. All of these can lead you to avoiding a task, but some of them are acceptable. And procrastination likes to disguise itself like the other two.

Let’s look at some examples of procrastination sneaking up on me. I pick the easiest assignment even if I have an essay due in a few days that I haven’t looked at. I do the dishes instead of studying for a Japanese test.

And then, of course, there’s the blatant procrastination. It doesn’t sneak up on me. I just sit there and watch it repeatedly punch me in the stomach as I spend hours (maybe, I’m not sure how long. Because I just lose track of time) on instagram or youtube, I am absorbed. I forget about everything I should be doing, and even when I remember, I simply push it away.

I used to realize, when I was doing this, that that’s what I was doing. Now, more often it feels like I blink and hours of my life are just gone. It's habitual, compulsive.

It feels like a cancerous type of relaxation. If I were in control, if I could put the phone down at any moment and walk away onto more serious tasks, instagram might become a welcome break rather than a procrastination tactic. I could not think about pressing things, for a few moments let my brain rest and calm down, and then jump back into the fray. But historically, that’s not how this goes. It's grown into something that I can’t quite grasp, and it feels entirely out of my control.

Procrastination has become a habit. I’m giving into these impulses to mindlessly scroll because I have before. Because I’m exhausted from everything else I’ve committed myself to: school and my job at Curtis Orchard and Cross Country and the show at the Station Theatre and the script I’m directing for Studrpod. I think I want to escape from the less-structured things: college applications, homework assignments. So I get on my phone. It's an easy and convenient way to just stop the flow of all these teeny tiny tasks and expectations.

There needs to be a more controlled way to do this. Something that won’t keep me captive for hours once I log on. Just boring and unstimulating enough that I can escape for a controlled number of minutes and then return to my chaos.

There is. Surely, I could just go outside for a walk. Look out the window sipping a hot beverage. Turn my phone off and put it in a cardboard box and walk away.

In theory, its not that difficult. Physically, those actions are so simple.
I want to escape. But how?


note to readers:
- I think this is a bit all over the place, so if you see places to shift the structure to make it more cohesive that would be much appreciated.
-I also need to cut some stuff, so if you notice unnecessary things please tell me