Procrastination has affected you more than you realise

Samuel was young and his future seemed bright when he got admission into one of the best universities in the country to study Computer Engineering, his dream course. So he was full of expectations. Unfortunately, he soon became lax about his education and was always putting off studying for tests and examinations until the 11th […]

Samuel was young and his future seemed bright when he got admission into one of the best universities in the country to study Computer Engineering, his dream course. So he was full of expectations.
Unfortunately, he soon became lax about his education and was always putting off studying for tests and examinations until the 11th hour. He ended up graduating with a low grade. The cause was procrastination.
In his write-up, ‘Why wait? The science of procrastination,’ Eric Jaffe says: “a major misconception about procrastination is that it’s an innocuous habit at worst and may even be a helpful one at best. So sympathisers of procrastination say it doesn’t matter when a task gets done, what matters is that the task is done.
But respondents who spoke to Lifextra do not agree with this school of thought. One of them, Oluchi Edward, a lawyer in her early 30s says she tries not to push what she can do now for later, stating that whenever she does that, she becomes disorganised and this can lead to stress.
Edward said that every day she wakes up, especially on the first day of the week, she thinks of all she has lined up for the day, the time she intends to do those things and the place. “I basically create a schedule and sometimes write in my jotter the time for those activities so I don’t forget any, which could infringe on other activities,” she said, adding that since she started doing this, it has been easier keeping up to time, thereby averting undue stress.
Mrs. Gift Onyinye, a civil servant who is in her mid-forties, has great hatred for procrastination. As far as she is concerned, people who procrastinate are lazy and “I don’t like lazy people,” she insisted, pointing out that it shows how unorganised an individual is.
She explained that people who procrastinate do not ever get things right because they keep pushing ahead what needs to be done and end up not doing anything at all. “They usually never give themselves the opportunity to demonstrate what they are truly capable of doing,” Onyinye said.
So she proffers a solution, which she reveals, involves knowing some of the reasons why one procrastinates and how to overcome them. This gives room for correction and gives that person the opportunity to get started on those important tasks.
Twenty-two-year-old Adaobi Okoye, an undergraduate of Electrical and Communication Engineering at Nnamdi Azikiwe University who is currently an intern in a communication firm, intimated that she never really gave much thought to what procrastination would do to her. In school she believed she had everything under control and was answerable to no one but herself. But during the course of her internship, she realised she had to do things on time.
One incident taught Okoye an important lesson. There was a day her boss gave her a particular assignment. “I took the assignment lightly and was doing it at my own pace. I didn’t know that what he gave me to do would affect his own job if I didn’t do it on time. On the day he asked me for the feedback, I had nothing to show. He was so disappointed and angry, he had to do it himself and he almost got a query for what I did,” she narrated.
Okoye added that although she felt then that she had nothing to lose, overtime she realised her loss when her boss stopped delegating responsibilities to her. This made her become more pro-active and she had to start proving to him all over again that she was responsible.
Like Okoye, others admitted procrastination was a part of them and they were making all efforts to break free from it because they have missed a lot of opportunities as a result. A typical example is Mary John, a married woman in her early thirties who resides in Jos, Plateau State.
Before she got married, she was always putting off a lot of activities with the intention that she would get them done later. “I didn’t know that it would affect me later in life,” she told Lifextra. “Now that I am married, it’s really affecting me and I’m trying so hard to fight it because I miss a lot of opportunities. It affects the way I do my house chores and I don’t like it. I’m trying to stop it.”