Ahmed: Procrastinating good for your image

From our earliest days of elementary education, we have been told to finish our homework and… From our earliest days of elementary education, we have been told to finish our homework and chores before a given deadline. Our society has an on-the-run attitude, which adds reason for us to adhere to schedules. In some ways, we have become a slave of our own invention: time.

In school, we are told of the horrors of procrastination and how to avoid falling victim to them. There are many tips and tricks to increase our output and stay competitive. Before you start following those guidelines and pit yourself against procrastination, think. Is procrastination always as bad as it is made out to be?

No, and I’ll even argue that procrastination can be cool — yes, cool — and has its place in a college experience.

People tend to admire extreme sports and achievements of difficult feats, and I bet there are many unproclaimed adrenaline junkies out there. Well, we can shift this attitude to our school work too. That’s right. We can get academically extreme. And while I suppose it’s extreme to take on seven-course semesters, there’s a simpler method: procrastinate.

The main rule is, of course, to restrict your time on an assignment. Think about it. Which sounds cooler: I worked on an essay 30 minutes a day for two weeks. I made sure to leave little rainbow-colored stickies where I thought I needed more work. I revised, re-revised and had two friends check it over for me. I got an A. Or, I started that essay two hours before deadline, cranked it out and aced it.

Of course the latter sounds cooler. Notice, though, that performing well is a prerequisite for procrastination to be cool. Doing an assignment in your head five minutes before class is not appreciable if it garners you a lousy score. So don’t take just any procrastination to heart.

Regardless, that time extremism is admirable.

Secondly, procrastination tests you in a new way. You must be able to work under pressure, and that is a feat that could take some getting used to. I guess it’s another way to differentiate students by skill. Don’t get me wrong: It is not a disadvantage to buckle under time pressure. It just means you should probably pursue a career accordingly.

When you are looking for a job that’s fast paced and pressurizing, your procrastination skills will come in handy.

From a sales representative who must make X number of deals by noon to the surgeon who must race the clock to keep a patient alive, being able to work against time is a necessary trait. You’re not always going to get the time to neatly plan everything out on a calendar, and need I bring up the stickies again?

Your spontaneity and present energy will help you past time crunches. There is no better place to learn these skills than through procrastination in college.

Finally, putting work off until later and then quickly completing it is a way to assess your limits. I know you’re anxious, but before you prove your extreme-ness, take a practice test, so to speak. Time yourself and write that big paper or finish that chapter of homework. Did you meet your goal? Was the paper shoddy, the homework’s answers incorrect? Remember, proper procrastination is a learned skill.

When writing that essay in three hours, you can only type so fast, but you’re also limited by how fast you can think of flowing ideas. Or when finishing physics homework, you learn how far your mathematical shortcuts and calculator tricks will take you.

Know your limits so you can plan accordingly, especially in college. When selecting your course schedule, you’ll know how much work you can complete every day, once you’ve built up that time pressure. Therefore, you can better know how many credits to take and which courses will be most suitable.

But not all procrastination is good. We’re not all meant to live on the edge.

Waiting on an assignment and then completing it half-heartedly and performing poorly is never a sound option. Letting assignments hang for weeks so that the sheer volume of work eclipses your procrastination prowess is an equally unwarranted scenario. Procrastination is an ability worth honing but also one that’s practiced best with moderation and control. Controlled procrastination sounds oxymoronic, I know, but even the best procrastinators face limits.

If applied properly, procrastinating can give you an edge, however counterintuitive that might seem. It’s all right. Your professor won’t know you did it all in an hour. Hopefully.

E-mail Abdul at aba24@pitt.edu.