By Warren Zhao, Staff Reporter
Procrastination. Dilly-dallying. It comes in many forms, and multiple names, but at its core, time wasting is something most people are guilty of. The Spoke asked several ’Stoga students how they go about practicing the art of not being productive.
Sophomore Abigail Lewis is one of those guilty of throwing away their time. However, unlike many, Lewis manages to stay mostly productive on school nights.
“Most school nights, I don’t waste time as much. It’s more on the weekends, when I have more time (to dispose of). On school nights, I waste around 20 minutes, but on weekends, it’s more around the range of two hours,” Lewis said. “Instead of doing work, I set it out in front of me, and then go do other stuff that isn’t school-related. I text my friends about random stuff, or I watch videos on my phone,”
She is not sure why she wastes time, but she surmised that “it’s more me not wanting to do schoolwork and trying to avoid it. I don’t really think (wasting time) is a good thing, but when I sit down to actually do the work, I’m more motivated to complete it quickly,”.
Junior Michael Medica also frequently wastes his time. For him, time-wasting is not a process.
“I usually just lay out the things I need to do, and then through a complicated series of different methods of procrastination, I usually end up not doing (what I needed to). I refresh things on social media, I go on schoology hoping there’s a new grade (updated) when I know there isn’t, or just sit there and listen to music. I would guess that there’s usually a good hour and a half of inefficiently used time,” Medica said.
He believes that procrastination is healthy for one’s stress levels in the short term. However, oftentimes he ends up in a worse position than when he started, which counteracts the brief stress reduction.
Junior Evan Cain spends most of his days in a non-productive state.
“Usually, during free periods when I should be doing work, I talk to friends or read a book that isn’t for school just for fun. After school, I usually take the train into the city and I can’t really do work on the ride because it’s bouncing around, so I just listen to music and sleep. When I get home, I sometimes procrastinate by taking a shower or eating dinner for an extended period of time. I don’t normally waste time on weekends, because I like to get my work done on Saturday mornings so I don’t have to worry about it for the rest of the weekend,” Cain said.
Cain is not too sure why he wastes his time, but he almost always feels “pretty bad” after having done it.
Senior Jameswell Zhang is a self-proclaimed “master of procrastination”.
“After I go home, usually I startup my computer, launch League of Legends, or Reddit, or Imgur, depending on how I’m feeling. I’ll spend about an hour and a half on one of those, then move on to the other two. On the weekend, I just repeat the three in cycles,” Zhang said.
He claims that “I know I should be doing schoolwork and getting it done sooner rather than later so I can have more free time, but I usually go with the ‘now’ rewards rather than the ‘later’ rewards. I consider it rewarding myself in advance for the work I’m going to do,”.
Zhang is usually “disappointed” with himself when he procrastinates, and is “even more disappointed” afterwards, but would without hesitation repeat his actions, given the chance.
Warren Zhao can be reached at [email protected].
