Procrastination as a new age art form

One thing that I have learnt to do really well this year is to procrastinate. Although it might sound like an easy thing to do it is in fact an art! A professional procrastinator is as stealthy as a ninja and as self destructive as a shopaholic at a sale! No matter how much I try and put my mind to it I never seem to get my essays done ahead of time but constantly end up writing them the night before. Some of my fellow journalism class mates like to think of this as motivation rather than slacking off as they say that they are waiting for inspiration to hit (otherwise known as last minute panic). I suppose that if I think of it that way I could rationalise that by waiting until the last minute I am teaching myself how to work in the real world of short deadlines and working under pressure. The only problem with that rationalisation is that I know it’s only half true and fuelled by a desire not to do my work. So in order to combat the progressing procrastination I recruited my friends to help me. One of the ways we now use to keep us working is to have scheduled midnight coffee breaks. We actually stumbled across this method by accident one night when we were pulling an all-nighter to finish off an essay (two in my case). I would never have guessed that a scheduled break would actually help me work but it does. After supper we all head off to our respective rooms to work and later meet up for coffee/tea and sometimes biscuits (yum yum). Seeing as we are all more than a little competitive it kind of acts like a competition to see who has finished the most work thus far. Therefore I don’t know if it will work for anyone else but I thought what the hell if it doesn’t work for you, you will have at least gotten a laugh out of this post.

Time is a strange thing...

Time is a strange thing that at Rhodes can be experienced in many different ways. Sometimes there never seems to be enough time. I constantly see people rushing off to the next thing they have to do as our lives revolve around schedules of work. We don’t even eat when we are hungry or sleep when we are tired but rather only do these things when our schedules permit them. This seems like a crazy notion but it is in fact the honest to goodness truth. Then there are those moments when time seems to be endless. They usually occur during a particularly boring lecture or when you are particularly tired from either pulling an all-nighter or going out. You stare at the clock and can swear it feels like the minute hand is ticking in reverse.
I’m sure that a lot of people at Rhodes or anywhere for that matter can relate to these ways in which time passes. But none of these forms are more contagious or destructive than procrastination. It is the sneakiest way of experiencing time as it can often happen without you even realising. For example today I returned from my ‘scheduled’ lunch to find that I had an hour to kill before my next lecture. What to do with it? Was the first thing that I thought, sleep perhaps, work on my politics essay or maybe type a blog post? By the time I have come to a decision on what to do with this extra unscheduled time I realise that so much time had passed that it no longer mattered. This is a vicious cycle called procrastination and it is possibly the worst way to spend your time especially when you do have work to complete. The only problem is that procrastination is inevitable and, depending on how you spend the time, quite fun.
So it would seem that a majority of your first year at Rhodes is spent trying to figure out the best balance or mix of rushing off, sitting still and procrastinating that best suits you. I am currently still in the process of figuring this out for myself but as you can see from the blog post that I completed in my free hour I am slowly finding the best way forward for me.