Procrastination: Based on Attitude?

Most of you are probably too busy studying to read this at this point but procrastination is a big issue among students, especially when it comes to homeworks and exams. I'm pretty sure most of you have heard your friends whining on their Facebook statuses, saying how much they're putting off this and that, but we never tend to think about why we do it.

When we are overwhelmed by multi-tasking, especially during very important periods such as midterms and finals, we tend to do things that are important first, in a descending order. Everything comes off as stressful at first but slowly comes off as laid back as the least important tasks, the ones that we think are easy, are put off to last.

A high school senior from Roslyn High School takes the dodge to research why students procrastinate. Caroline Trezza of Roslyn Heights, Long Island surveyed 168 sophomores and juniors to find the cause of procrastination, to see the difference between motivation and self-confidence that affect their ability to complete assignments on time as part of her research for the Young Epidemiology Scholars contest, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, for which she won second-place with $35,000.

Trezza, who says she also puts things off herself at times, concluded that those who were confident tend to get things done faster. To avoid procrastination, students should be taught to make completing tasks a priority at a very young age so they could easily be more acclimated in getting things done faster.

In my opinion, I don’t think the factor of procrastination has much to do with whether a teen is confident or not. In my high school, there were many students who were confident, or appeared confident, but most have failed to complete assignments on time. Confident or not confident, it varies on each person’s motivation to learn how to make things a priority no matter how important things are. As someone who is caught up with many assignments, I try to align my tasks in a descending order of the most important to least and sometimes by the time I get to the last, I figure how easy it would be to get that task done and I hold off by taking a break. I think many students try to make their work a priority, no matter how confident or not confident they are.