It is a Thursday night at 10:30 p.m. You have an assignment due at midnight, and you have not even started yet. Procrastination is something most people have experienced and is typically surrounded with negative connotations.
However, people hardly talk about the positives that come from setting work aside to do later.
The most abundant benefit of procrastinating is enabling more creativity to your work. The abstraction of having more time to reflect upon your work will increase creativity and result in better outcomes.
If you get a project done just to complete it sooner rather than later, you will miss the extra time of reviewing and potentially revitalizing it to be a much bigger picture. Due dates promote using extra time. Why not take advantage of that to enhance your creativity?
For many jobs you will have to make quick decisions and not have time to reassure yourself. One of the best ways to practice quick decision-making is by procrastinating.
When people have only 20 minutes to complete an activity, they will find a way to get it done before time is up. That alone is practice for making quick decisions.
Managers, lawyers, doctors, journalists, and many other jobs are constantly being faced with sudden predicaments while also being expected to find an efficient way to handle it.
This comes from intuition, and what is an effective way to be better in touch with your intuition? By being against the clock and having to trust your instincts by not having enough time to doubt yourself. Why is credited to procrastinating.
Not only does procrastination help with making quick decisions, it helps us with handling stress. When I first started getting consistent homework in school, it would always stress me out, and when I put it aside until the last minute, I would end up being even more stressed. This is a familiar situation that we have all experienced.
However, the more I procrastinated the less stressed out I became when I eventually had homework. Like practicing an instrument or sport, the more I did it the better I became. This has translated directly to outside of school as well. My friends and family have praised my ability to handle stressful situations, and I credit that to procrastinating.
Waiting to do homework until midnight is a rather extreme example of procrastinating, but it can come in much smaller affairs: holding a task off for five minutes just so you could listen to one more song, waiting to do laundry until all your clothes are dirty, waiting to take part in a fitness journey, and many others. All of which have their own minute ways of helping our everyday lives.
It is ill-advised to change your approach on tasks, especially if it works for you. However, if you catch yourself procrastinating, do not be ashamed of it because doing so will help you out in a lot more ways than you may realize.
Categories: Editorials, Opinion
