Procrastination is literally something that plagues my schedule every day. I just can’t help it. Procrastinating is just a part of who I am. I even procrastinate on things that I want to do, simply because it’s just in my nature to. We all procrastinate to an extent, so we all know these stages of procrastination:

Stage 1: Thinking That You Have Enough Time

You always tell yourself that, “Oh yeah, I can totally do this in three hours. That’s so much time.”, even though you should have started way earlier. Your brain always makes excuses for you. Even when you have a free week before the exam, you never fail to tell yourself that, “I can just do it tomorrow” and “What’s one more day?” until there is no more time left and you have to start.

Stage 2: Opening the Laptop/Notebook

We all know we do this just to make ourselves feel better, because at least we tried by having the material in front of us, right? You have your supplies out all nice and neat in front of you, but you ignore all of it as you scroll through your phone instead—and it will be a while before you actually start paying attention to the notebooks and textbooks in front of you.

Stage 3: The Social Media Stage

Before you can put that phone down though, you have to make sure you’re not missing anything. You just have to check every social media outlet: Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, just once more, just to make sure you’ve open every snapchat and looked at every mention. After all, you won’t be looking at your phone for forever because you have work to do.\

Stage 4: The Napping Stage

After reading just one line in your textbook, your brain and body decides that you’ve deserved a nap for all your hard work—even though you’ve done next to nothing.

Stage 5: The Snacking Stage

Then you get hungry and you persuade yourself to get out of your seat to fetch yourself a snack. You swear that this is the last interruption and that the food will help you focus. After you get food in your system, you’ll be able to get yourself together, you’re sure of it.

Stage 6: The Cleaning Stage

But how can you get everything together if everything is a mess? You get up and tidy your desk up and make sure all your study guides are in order and all your notebooks are neatly lined up next to each other. Might as well clean up your room too, because the mess around you is not going to help you focus, either.

Stage 7: The Caffeine Stage

After all these stage have passed, you realized that the sun has set and you don’t have as much time to finish everything as you thought you would. So, you start planning for an all-nighter, and in order to pull an all-nighter you need caffeine :) Therefore, you leave your notebook/textbook once more to go for a coffee run.

Stage 8: Actually Doing the Work

Now you can finally study. You cleared out all your notifications, you fit a nap in, you’re full on snacks, everything around you is clean, and you got your caffeine to help you stay awake and focus. Now, you can start doing your work with no more interruptions.

Until you hear a DING! come from your phone . . .