It is Tuesday night and the clock’s ticking, you’re furiously typing with the hope to finish the project before the noon deadline, while silently berating yourself for not starting sooner. Countless thoughts are racing through your mind. What happened? Where did it go wrong? How did you lose your focus Sounds familiar? Well, you’re not alone, this is called procrastination.
What is procrastination?
At first glance, the word procrastination doesn’t seem to have a deep meaning but when you dive deeper into the subject you can see that it is just more than a word.
The official definition of procrastination is to keep delaying something that must be done. When you procrastinate, you lose the time that’s there to invest in doing something more meaningful.
There are 2 types of procrastination;
Structured procrastination
It means achieving tasks that are less important and less convenient rather than fulfilling tasks that are more important and more convenient to be achieved.
Garden variety procrastination
It is achieving tasks that are more pleasurable than achieving the less pleasurable ones.
Why fight procrastination?
Procrastination is the main barrier keeping us down, stopping us from making the right decision and preventing us from reaching our goals. Procrastinating doesn’t exactly mean laziness, because lazy people don’t do anything and they are completely fine with it. Procrastinators have the desire to do something, yet they cannot force themselves to start. They regret the things they haven’t done, rather than be happy with the things they have achieved. They also feel guilty about the missed opportunities. This is why we should try to prevent procrastination as much as possible because, in the end, it causes stress and fatigue making the work we did utterly useless because we found no joy in doing it.
How does procrastination affect online students?
Procrastination is a major issue in online learning. Online presence in a particular course needs a lot of self-regulation on the students’ part. This self-regulation provides a space for independent tasks to be completed promptly to reduce external pressure.
How to overcome the effects of procrastination in online learning?
Procrastination is the cause of most failures in an online course, but one still has a probability to overcome it. Here are some ways to overcome procrastinating in your schoolwork.
- Create a classroom schedule, it is totally up to you to decide when the work finishes or continues and remember to stick to the schedule.
- Prevent your failure, failures do teach us something in life when necessary but it’s always not good to accumulate failures as it is a sign of a downstep. So better prevent failures as it makes you appreciate yourself when something successful has been achieved.
- Don’t waste your opportunities, as they say, opportunities come your way only once so make the most of it.
These are the 3 main ways to overcome the effects of procrastination in online learning. Now that we understand what procrastination is, let us avoid it by completing all our daily tasks and be free as a bird gliding through the crystal-clear blue skies.
Done by: Thiviru & Gokul