What kind of procrastinator are you?

Hello my triad. Read the title of this week’s post again. Right, now, you might say “hey, wait a minute, I am not a procrastinator” to what I’d have to answer “Baloney”. If you are not then I need to CAPTCHA this site and fend off machine readers because, if you’re human, you’re a procrastinator. So, we’ll talk about different kinds of procrastinators and you’ll be able to identify yourself. It’ll be a fun experience in self exploration, you’ll see. I’m in no way saying this classification is final, if you google “different kinds of procrastinator” which I did, Google’s a procrastinator’s best friend, you find that there are many posts like this one, some even better, and that they don’t have the same numbers. So I’m going to use a simple one, and then on future posts we’ll be able to elaborate. The simplest classification would be a couple, but that’s not going to cut it this time, so we’ll go with a triad, hey, just as many as my readers, maybe there one of each in here. So, the three types of procrastinators very different amongst them, the reason they procrastinate is not the same and the things they procrastinate on are not the same either. The first one we can remember, and that’s the person who suffers from the “student’s syndrome” and is proud of it. We’ve all been students here, some for a longer time others not that long ago but we’ve all been there and done that. The majority of students tend to put off work to the last possible moment, for instance, if an essay is given now, just before the new year’s break, and it’s due on, let’s say the third week of February you’ve got a better chance of winning the lottery than having half of the class start the work on the week that they come back from the break. “What’s the rush” they might say, “I need to do more research” might be another “reason” that’s a rationalization and not a reason. But hey, let’s be fair, not only students suffer from this, if that was the case then they wouldn’t be so long lines and online jams on tax return season, or other mandatory tasks that governments and organizations make us do. And most of them are easy to do, but yet they’re put off to the last minute. So, why do we do this to ourselves? Well, some research combines two reasons. Our lack of vision and our like of cortisol and adrenaline. Our lack of vision makes us think that a certain task will take less time and will not be plagued by interruptions and accidents. When we estimate the time a task will take to be finished we remember how much a similar task took. The problem is our memory isn’t flawless and we tend to make good things bigger and minimize bad things. This is nice and leads to a healthier life, but it’s awful as a measuring stick to do a benchmark on. Compound that with the fact that we also tend to forget that Murphy exists, and all hell breaks loose. Now we have less time to do our task, we must decide how to do “the impossible” and that’s where the second reason kicks in. With the stress we caused our bodies and the fear that’s starting to materialize the hormones start rushing on our system. We feel cortisol but also adrenaline levels rise and we get a rush out of it. We feel that rush and we work nonstop to finish the assignment, the project, a report. Lucky for most we can turn in a good enough work, and we feel happy about our heroics, but we know it wasn’t our best effort, but hey, under the circumstances, in the end, we pulled it off on such a short amount of time. We put ourselves into an ego boosting trip. If the work is good then we are ecstatic for the amazing job we did, if the work is not good enough we find tons of excuses of why that was, most of them have to do with not having enough time or being hit by Murphy when we know it was us who decided to start working much later. There you have it. The first kind of procrastinator, the student. I know I behave like this sometimes, much less now than when I was an actual student. Do you remember when you acted like this? Leave a comment if you’d like to share with us.