United we stare

Blink. Then blink again. Then realise that you are blinking. As you realise this, notice that it is not remarkable in its own right. It is remarkable in that it makes you realise that you've done something, because quite frankly you have spent the last fifteen minutes or so (fifteen whole minutes!) doing nothing at all. Just staring at that one spot on the wall, not aware of anything. You blinked again. See? Hardly remarkable now, is it?

Procrastination - the plague that riddles every teenager, twenty-something-year-old and just about anyone who has to meet a deadline of some sort. It astounds us, it terrifies us, and it unites us. It has fuelled companies and websites, and its repercussions - having to cram in an immense amount of work into a very short time frame - leaves the coffee industry's pockets nice and taught. Well, tea in my case. I decided to write about this particular topic because last week as I sat down to work I was permeated by that inexplicable desire to do nothing. Nothing at all. Not only did I want to avoid doing the work I had to do, I had absolutely no inkling or desire to do anything else that might be deemed productive in some form or fashion. To top this off, doing nothing at all also incited frustration. Doing nothing was not an option. But there was nothing that I deemed worthy of doing. So I sat and paced and sat and did nothing and went over my options, deciding that none of them was a viable solution, I paced and sat and did more nothing. In the end, I picked up my guitar.

Coming from the Latin pro (forward) and crastinus (of tomorrow), Wiki tells us that procrastination is "particularly prevalent in the academic setting" , even citing that "80-95% of college students engage in procrastination, approximately 75% consider themselves procrastinators". How about that for unity in diversity? There's even a Student syndrome described, where "people will start to fully apply themselves to a task just at the last possible moment before a deadline". As I read through the page I realised just how true this all is. How many people do I know that are always ready on time with presentations? How many keep to their study schedule and don't have to cram in at the end or leave bits and bobs out? It affects us to such a degree that we've made a science out of sitting for exams. With just a little information of the exam format we can deduce the important things to go over, how many questions we can afford to leave out, and even tackle the beast that is negative marking with only the most basic of background information. Being a student isn't about vigour or applying yourself to hard work and learning (well perhaps for some of us it is, though rarely in areas that we really need to be). It's about being able to write five hundred words on... well... nothing.

But procrastination has been with us since the dawn of time. What is scary about it today is that it's been made semi-pro. Twitter. Blogs. Youtube. Facebook. The titans of modern slacking. They provide us with hours of meaningless activity if we're desperate enough to look for it. Or create it. As exam season rolls around the activity sky rockets with status updates every fifteen minutes, then comments on the updates, then comments on the comments, and down the spiral we go. How many hours of our lives have we lost to these monsters? What was life like before we had them? Because I don't know if you've noticed, but we can be pretty resourceful and creative when it comes to applying ourselves to something if it means avoiding applying ourselves to something else. If we didn't have these networking sites maybe we could devote our time to creating something new, to discovering some new insight about life, to having real conversations with real people about real things. Maybe, when you think about it, procrastination isn't such a bad thing. Maybe it's what sometimes drives us to explore areas of life that we never would. To bring out the poet, the scientist, the friend inside all of us. But we'll never get there if we're still looking around for a new profile picture.