Your professor announces profoundly, “Be ready for your test that is coming up in two weeks.” You kick back in your seat and pshhhhh it off to your neighbor. It’s two weeks, after all. You have all the time in the world. You always will tell yourself one thing: "I'll do it tomorrow." And then tomorrow really happens and it is the day before the test. You look upon the test material and colorful vocabulary enters your mind as you see the plethora of items you should have been studying for the past month. Where did the time go? Well, reality check; it creeps up faster than you think.
This is what a life of a procrastinator would look like hours before the big test:
As you sit down with your books sitting on your desk, notes out, and highlighter in hand, your phone stares at you blankly. You start to study but your phone brightens up announcing someone posted a comment on your picture on Instagram. You think to yourself, five minutes of social media won’t hurt, right? All I need to do is check my Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Tumblr, and even my Google+ account (even though no one uses Google+). You then proceed to YouTube for crazy cat videos and Taylor Swift's newly posted music video. After two hours of looking up at your phone or laptop, you realize you could have been studying for those two hours instead of looking at random cat videos.
You walk into your room after having a long-belated bowl of cereal and find clothing, shoes, and fast food receipts all over the floor. You pick up two pairs of shoes and start a cleaning chain reaction. One trash bag later, you lay down on your freshly made bed and everything is perfectly in order. Your room is clean but your homework still isn’t done.
You keep telling yourself you are procrastinating but can’t seem to find the motivation to do what you need to do. After a few hours of sitting and staring blankly at the wall, you go over to the apartment a few doors down at begin a simple conversation by saying, “I’m procrastinating." You proceed to tell your friends around you while talking to them about life for the next hour, or you try to engage yourself with a topic that you know nothing about.
After your long motivational talk with your friends, you finally think "I think I will be responsible and go for a run or lift some weights," even though you haven't been to the gym since gym class in high school. YEAH! You run at a slow pace but find yourself thinking, “Hey, this is better than studying!”
Food always seems like a good motivator. You pick up the bag of M&M's you got from Walmart a few hours before and repeat, "I will eat one peanut butter M&M every time I get an answer right." Instead you proceed to chow down on the candy while admiring its deliciousness. As soon as you bag of M&M’s are gone, you go for the crackers, and you know what happens next...
Continuing your path of procrastination, you hear your roommate loudly close the door and plop on the couch. She turns on the TV and enters her Netflix password and proceeds to binge watch a few shows. You casually walk out to get a glass of water and begin to engage in conversation with her even if the show is about talking unicorns, mundane killers trying to defeat supernatural forces, or some pop culture documentary; you watch anything you can feast your eyes with.
You hear your roommates and friends walk through the door, wondering why they don't have as much homework as you. As they rally up to go find people to play volleyball or go to a school event, you sit surrounded by the massive globs of homework at your feet that you have not touched. Your roommates peek their heads in the room, and with an ambitious attitude, they pull you from the chains of homework and make you do an activity while they tell you that, "You don't need to do homework. You need to have fun!" You begin to have fun as you let them brainwash you into endlessly not caring about how much homework you have.
The homework that you have not touched is crying out for you to study it. You begin to look over the notes the night before, along with the 20 pages of notes and the 200 pages' worth of material that you should know down to a science before one p.m. the next day. You have a mental breakdown, drown yourself to tears, and eat a jar of Nutella as you profusely cram as much information into your brain as you can handle. As you have your mental breakdown, you proceed to tell yourself you will NEVER procrastinate again while you study, but let's be real here: you will most likely do it again.
Procrastination is curable. The procrastinators need to find that cure, but we all know that probably won't happen.