Procrastination

I found this in my files today. I haven’t exactly gotten around to writing anything for this week yet, though, so I decided to post it. Hopefully it’s good, I haven’t read it yet 🙂

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As a high school sophomore, I’m halfway through my high school career and thus extremely experienced in the subject of procrastination. I haven’t quite reached the point where I’m so used to procrastination that I’m numb to it, which I suspect that seniors w/ senioritis likely feel. Neither am I at that point of starry-eyed innocence that I started freshman (freshwoman?) year with when I thought that I would be a perfect, wonderful person who never procrastinates and is always so productive because after all, I’m oLd NoW!

On the whole, procrastination just means “to put off intentionally and habitually” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). It’s when you say, “Oh yes, I’ll do that in five minutes,” and then five minutes later, it’s “five more minutes” again, and so on and so forth, until you’ve wasted your entire day and you’ll just tell yourself, “I’ll do that tomorrow, then.” It’s how you end up starting your final project five hours before it’s due (or, in even worse cases, five hours after it’s due).

On a perhaps more quantitative analysis of what procrastination is, however (but still one that I don’t need to do any research for, so still barely quantitative), I think there are three main types of procrastination: rabbit hole procrastination, intentional procrastination, and productive procrastination. Every example of procrastination I can think of in five minutes falls into these three categories. These three types of procrastination then build up and combine to make the sort of situation where you have all year to work on an essay and yet end up staying up three nights in a row to finish stress-writing it.

Rabbit Hole Procrastination

Hello, my name is Alice. I like braiding dandelion crowns because they’re pwetty! Ooh! Butterflies! Wait, look! There’s a rabbit! He’s holding something and looks silly. And he took my flower! I should go after him! He’s going down a hole? That’s fine, I’m smol and I can follow him! Mr. Wabbit, wait up!

Oh goody, he left my flower here. Maybe I should go back… Woow, there’s a cup! I wonder what it tastes like—no no, mummy says to never drink things that strangers give me. But wait, strangers didn’t give this to me. I just found it, no one’s giving it to me. Yummy, ooh, I’m tiny! Cool! The sky’s green! And there’s a walking fish! Oh, oh, and look there, there’s a pink kitty, cute kitty, stop barking at me, hello talking mouse man, it’s nice to meet you, no kitty don’t eat him, oh I want to play cards! Hello Mrs. Witchy, can I have a broom?—

That, ladies and gentlemen, was a typical example of rabbit hole procrastination. Perhaps Alice started her adventure down the rabbit hole with a valid reason—getting her flower back, or maybe just figuring out what that suspicious rabbit was doing—but soon, she’d forgotten all about her initial purpose. Instead, she just kept running deeper into the rabbit hole, further and further away from what she was originally meant to do.

In modern, non-fairytale times, such procrastination mainly takes the form of surfing the internet. With the pandemic going on and being stuck at home 24/7, the only thing most of us can do is surf the internet, so rabbit hole procrastination is even more prevalent than I think it used to be.

As an example, perhaps you might start with researching “Alice in Wonderland” so you can write about procrastination, but you mistype “Wonderland” and instead find yourself looking at “Alice in Borderland.” Because it honestly looks awfully interesting there’s a 7 of hearts in that photo, so clearly this is related to “Alice in Wonderland.” So I have to have a good understanding of what this story entails, obviously, and Wikipedia says this is part of the “survival genre.” Clearly, I need to know what that is. 

Hmm. Blah blah blah, I should really watch more movies because I don’t know any of these, wait Frozen is a survival film??? Ooh, not that frozen. Blah blah blah, Jurassic Park, Life of Pi! We watched that in the movie theaters a long time ago. It was about someone and a tiger, and math? I don’t know, maybe the tiger learned math?

…Oh, never mind. No math. But there might still be math that they just didn’t feel like mentioning on Wikipedia. I should watch some movie clips just to be sure. And maybe this suggested clip of a tiger playing with boxes, because clearly, I need to get into the psyche of a tiger to fully understand The Life of Pi.

*five hours later*

What was I doing again?

Oh, yes. Alice. Uh, my Alice doesn’t actually need to be perfectly true to Lewis Carroll’s Alice, right? Like, maybe they’re close cousins. Or maybe Alice’s story was transmitted to Lewis Carroll through word-of-mouth, and MY Alice is the real Alice! Figuratively speaking. Or Alice really just has recurring dreams that are mostly the same but slightly different, so in reality, we’re both right? I read about recurring dreams one time, it was really interesting. Where was it—oh! Hmm. Apparently, some people dream about their teeth falling out. And it symbolizes feeling insecure? It has something to do with Carl Jung, which is so silly because it clearly should have to do with the Tooth Fairy. Oh my gosh, these Tooth Fairies are SO CUTE! Ooh, tooth fairy traditions—oh wow, people actually go to this much effort to set up tooth fairy shenanigans? Wait this is soo cute! A tooth receipt! I used to love getting the Costco smiley faces on receipts and it’s the literal worst part of growing up, they won’t draw smiley faces for me anymore :(. Wait some Costco somewhere BANNED the smiley faces??? Ooh, interesting, dance-off!…

Intentional Procrastination

The thing about rabbit hole procrastination is that, generally, you step into it with a rather possibly somewhat kind of good reason. Maybe it started as a slight research tangent, or something you generally thought was important/interesting/vaguely useful/not, you know, a TikTok of someone playing “Subway Surfers” to an AI voiceover.

Intentional procrastination, on the other hand, is sprawling on your bed, pulling Genshin Impact up on your phone, and staying there for the rest of the day, because you can always do that essay tomorrow, you’ve still got a week. You know that you should get something done but you just don’t do it. In a way, rabbit hole procrastination sneaks up on you when you’re not looking: you’re doing something reasonable, and then you’re still doing something reasonable but you know others might not fully understand why, and then you realize that you’ve just wasted five hours of your life. With intentional procrastination, you sort of start off already knowing it’s perhaps not the best idea. Of course, when you look up from your screen and realize it’s been hours, it’s still a shock because Procrastination in general is just a sneaky bastard like that.

idk theres not much else i want to say? ig ill just say cOvId ew & youre welcome for that enlightening speech 

ok ill come back to this later

Productive Procrastination

This refers to when you study math to procrastinate on your english homework, or…

Well, that’s it, really. I mostly included this type for jason lol

Because I haven’t really made any bad metaphors yet, procrastination is like a bad gift. With rabbit hole procrastination, the gift is contained in a box in a box in a box in a etc. When you’re given it at the beginning, you think: “Ooh! Big box! This must be a great gift!” And then as you open box after box after box, you might start to get a sinking feeling in your stomach that’s sort of telling you, “Hmm, maybe this isn’t such a good idea and it might not be such a great gift if there are so many boxes.” But the monkey in your brain sheds all over that feeling in your stomach and buries it. Then it starts wreaking havoc on the reasoning and logic parts of your brain and you decide this is a great idea after all. And then you reach the center and burn yourself on a lump of coal.

Meanwhile, intentional procrastination is when the coal is just wrapped in a layer of non-flammable paper. Just looking at it and touching it, you already sort of vaguely know that this is a bad idea—it just looks like a horrible gift, and you can feel the heat even through the layer of paper. But you open the gift anyway (and maybe it takes you a long time to open it because the gifter did a horrible tape job in addition to giving you a horrible gift) and find the same lump of coal.

Finally, productive procrastination is when the gift is wrapped really, really prettily. The wrapping paper is full of fractal designs and the bow is a golden spiral of some sort. You rip open the paper with delight and maybe the gifter honestly thinks it’s a great gift (like, because maybe they think this is Minecraft and you need coal). And maybe it’s better than the other procrastination gifts, too: maybe it’s not as hot, so it doesn’t burn you as badly, or maybe there’s more of it because more is always better. But in the end, it’s still just coal.

(though to be fair I actually think coal isn’t really all that bad as far as bad gifts could go. Like, what if Santa just stuffed your stocking full of dung? Now that would be nasty.)

you know that you should get something done but like you just don’t do it

uh

idk what to writeeeeea;sldfawbao;weyal.sdkjghil78ot9pq09;’0哇平时的风格艰苦奋斗，loaausdf.jlk.nm,bxhseato;9q0-’0{lsxdcnkd s9awQ”PLLSP[0EAWQ03[89TU00[9 P 8’-`=-1 9-C

IM HONESTLY SO PRODU OF MY KEYBOARD SMASHING IVE NEVER SWITCHED BETWEEN LANGUAGES WHEN KEYBOARD SMASHING BEFORE

Anways

Ok, so the thing is, these categories are honestly so arbitrary, to be fair i came up with them in like five minutes but still.

aah im borrredd

in summary procrastinate its good!

yyeeah maybe ill come back to this later have a good life