Why you should procrastinate every single assignment

Procrastination is considered a hallmark of being a bad student. But what if I told you that, while it’s detrimental in the hands of irresponsible students, it can actually boost your efficiency and the quality of your work?

Procrastination puts you on a strict timer, which can activate your stress hormones. A research paper by Roselinde K. Henderson actually demonstrates how stress can improve your cognitive performance (Henderson, 2012). In fact, this paper showed cognitive improvement in cases where that stress is controlled. When you procrastinate, you are in control over exactly how narrow you want that timer to be. With this improvement in cognitive performance, you will be able to crank out higher-quality work since your brain is more acute. 

One concern you may have is the possibility of time constraint producing lower-quality work that you might have otherwise revised. However, the sharpened mental acuity will make what seems like bad work at the moment be similar to the high-quality work created when your brain isn’t on adrenaline. Not only that, but your increased mental abilities will make you complete that quality work in less time, so time constraints aren’t as scary as one might think.  

Additionally, procrastination does not have to be waking up at 5 AM to do 80 pages of literature annotations due later that day. You can control exactly how much you want to procrastinate, which will allow you to maximize the utility of your high cognizance while minimizing the feeling of being rushed. Finally, because this procrastination allows you to do the same quality things in less time, you suddenly have a lot more space in your schedule to do other things that are interesting to you (like reading a mind blowing physics book ). 

You may be concerned that this constant stress you get from constant procrastination will be bad for you, but I assure you that this will not be the case. For one, you don’t have an essay due every day, so procrastination actually allows you to live most of your days homework- and stress-free. You also get to spend the additional time in your schedule destressing by playing video games and pursuing other fun activities! So even though you will sometimes be more stressed, on average, you will in fact be less stressed when you procrastinate. 

Of course, I’ve just been talking the talk without walking the walk about the benefits of procrastination. I’m also a terminal procrastinator. For example, although my college essays are due in a very short amount of time, I haven’t started on a lot of them. A couple of years ago, I always did my guided readings during lunch, right before my P6 APUSH class. In fact, I procrastinated on this very article. Given the fact that I am still a sane, functional human, I think it’s worked out quite well for me, and I encourage you to do the same. 

Sources:

Henderson, Roselinde K., et al. “When Does Stress Help or Harm? The Effects of Stress Controllability and Subjective Stress Response on Stroop Performance.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 3, no. 179, 2012, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00179.