Yes, Procrastination can be Productive!
Procrastination and I
By Alexandra Rosen
Part of my goal in taking this blogging internship with Keyreads was to find a productive way to engage in procrastination. That sounds like an oxymoronic statement; don’t worry, it is. But I also think it works, which you will see why in a moment.
I have a terrible habit of procrastination. Who doesn’t? There are a million things in today’s world are more interesting than anything we “should” be doing. I am going to give you some advice about how to beat the procrastination disease.
Nevertheless, my oxymoron of productive procrastination irons itself out eventually. Every week, I am compelled by one of my professors to read a book; in another class, poetry, excerpts, short stories, and novels; in the third course, I have to read theory which is the most difficult class, but sometimes easiest because the reading takes less time. My goal I told you was to find a productive way to procrastinate, which I have accomplished.
When I get very bored of schoolwork and all the reading I have to do seems extremely odious (do you not love the word odious? it is so old-fashioned and unused–and now I sound like a hipster who likes grandpa’s sweater for the same reasons), I simply hop onto my computer and write a new blog. My productivity resumes and I feel accomplished even though I have been procrastinating doing homework. The benefit of my procrastination is twofold. I am not only doing work for my internship, I am usually also collecting my thoughts about what I have read that week. Surprise, surprise, I have been telling you all about my reading list all semester! Sometimes my posts are not at all related to my studies, but some of my posts are. For example, when I told you about the Giants, definitely not related, but McTeague and Edward Said and Arabella are examples from each of my three classes this semester.
Procrastination, my internship proves, does not have to be unproductive. You can make good use of the time that you do not spend working on your homework. I used to do some of my best cleaning when I was procrastinating as an undergrad. So maybe you can start being a productive procrastinator by doing some laundry. Because we all know that you have some laundry that needs doing.
