Why procrastination is always the path to success

By Mike Silva

The beauty in this piece is in its irony. 

I remember piecing this together in about 15 minutes back in 2010. A good friend of mine, Brandon Scott, was short of writing on the Viewpoints page because someone flaked out on him and didn't present him their promised column. Idiot. 

So he asked if I could write one for him, since he already wrote something himself and didn't want the page to be all about him. 

I finished this column at just about the last possible minute for publication, which really just added to the message and authenticity of what I was trying to tell. As always, enjoy. 

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Procrastination. It is an act that we can all identify with and practice, especially as college students. 

If you procrastinate and put things off until the last second like I do, then you do it for several reasons: laziness, doubt, and just because. 

Being last-second about things is elementary in my everyday routine. 

I go to class, where I sit and listen to a lecture for over an hour, then I go to yet another class to do the same thing. When my time on campus has finally ended for the day, I go home and relax. 

Which is exactly what most students understandably do. The last, and I mean absolute last, thing I want to do is revisit the very things that I just spent the last three hours of my life absorbing. I want to escape that which I just endured, so I turn to procrastination. 

Most people will argue against procrastination, with reasonable debate. 

"If you get it done with as soon as possible, then you won't have to worry about it later," is a common phrase associated with the anti-procrastination discussion. This is true, but why worry about it immediately? Either way you have to get done whatever it is you need to get done. Take some time off in between, gather your thoughts and attack it with a fresh mindset. 

"When you do something at the last possible minute, you get no time to reexamine your work and correct your errors." This too is true. But think of it this way: with this mindset you are more accident-prone, thinking to yourself ‘oh, I can always go back and fix this,' essentially adding to your workload. And when do you go back and fix it? At the last possible second, therefore rendering procrastination inevitable. So why not do it all at once? 

If you are a master of procrastination, which I believe I am, then you have also adapted to working well under pressure, which in effect makes your margin of error smaller, increasing your attention to the work at hand. 

Don't listen to people that tell you otherwise. If you're the kind of person that likes to get things done early and that works for you, then stick to it. But for those procrastinators, the same rule applies. If you're good at putting things off to the last second, why change your ways? It's like I always say, "if it's not broke, don't fix it."