Let’s face it, dear reader. Whenever you get home from school, you’re probably sitting on your phone, doom scrolling on TikTok, sending snaps with your quirky little filters, or spamming your friends with Instagram reels. Your parents come into your room and lecture you about how you’re wasting away your time while you have a million other things to be doing. Like that big essay in English class, that you have had days in class to work on, but you don’t reeeally feel like doing it. All you’ve written is the title and maybe a couple sentences. Or maybe your room is a mess, and desperately needs to be cleaned. Despite what the adults might say, it’s okay! Procrastinating isn’t a big deal! And here, I will outline the reasons as to why.

For starters, you have more important things to be doing than studying or cleaning. For example, there’s this brand new movie that came out, and you just HAVE to drop everything to go watch it, even though it’s finals season. You’ll catch up later! You work really well under pressure! However, explaining this to your parents is like talking to a brick wall. But they just don’t get it! It’s not like being late on an assignment in their job means everyone else gets held up and turns people angry. It’s not like in the real world people rely on things being done in a timely manner so products can launch on time and they don’t lose money! Wicked just came out, and you NEED to go see Ariana Grande. 

And plus, you don’t get affected by procrastination. Let’s say you have a big test in math one day, but you’re too tired to study. You can’t concentrate enough. You already know everything. So you go to bed without looking over your notes. And then, the next day, you sit down at your desk and your teacher hands out the test, you completely forget whatever your teacher taught you. An exponential function and a logarithmic equation are basically the same thing, right? You forget a couple formulas that you should have studied. Oh well! You turn it in with simple errors that you wouldn’t have made if you simply studied. Your teacher hands your test back to you the next day, and you see your score on the test and gasp. A 72!?!? How could this happen! You should have gotten an A! But it’s A-okay, because there’s always retakes! But, you knew everything the first time, so you don’t really need to study for the retake. 

Now, your parents might say procrastination is a bad thing and that you’ll fall behind in class. In fact, your parents say that various longitudinal studies have shown correlation between procrastination and a whole myriad of mental health effects, including increased stress levels, decreased self-esteem, anxiety, and poor mental well being. But it’s okay! You’re different! You thrive under the pressure of putting assignments and studying off. It’s not like there is proof that procrastination in adult-life tends to reduce employment duration and increased financial issues, with procrastination causing around a $15K drop in salary! I could look it up, but I believe I speak for all procrastinators in the world when I say…

I’LL DO IT LATER!!!