Procrastination: Ineffective Practice or Misunderstood Skill?

It’s early in the semester, and you hear people talk about how they are already working on papers not due for another month. You will never understand why they are working on their papers so early. You know very well that you won’t get your papers done until the last minute. For this, they call you a procrastinator, but that’s okay; you know that your way is the best way. For you, it is the only way.

If you made it this far already by procrastinating, you are at that point when your best work actually comes from procrastination. When you actually try to sit down and do your work early, your work is just not as good as it would be if you did it at the last minute.

You work better under pressure, and what causes more pressure than starting your five-page paper at 12 a.m. when it is due at 8 a.m.? It is late at night, you just want to go to bed and time is running down for you to finish this paper. That is the perfect situation to be in for you to write the best paper of your life. Just imagine all the angry faces on the people who called you a procrastinator when you get a better grade than they do. That alone could make writing the paper until four in the morning worth it.

Procrastination is not something to look down upon. When done right, procrastinating is a skill. Not only is procrastination a skill, it is a way of life. Maybe it should not even be called procrastination; that word just sounds too negative. Daniel Norwood, a recent graduate of Eastern University, said, “It shouldn’t be called procrastination. It should be called clutchness!” Clutch is the perfect term for effective procrastination. In life, when things are done at the last minute, it can be called clutch.

If a quarterback plays horribly during the entire game but has a great fourth quarter and wins a game, people call it clutch. But if you wait until the last minute to write a great paper, people call it procrastination.

This double standard needs to end. Therefore, it shall no longer be called procrastination but shall be called clutch. Some students have the clutch factor; others do not. If you have the clutch factor, do not listen to the people who call you a procrastinator: just keep being clutch.