Jim's Column

With Spring springing up all around us, everything seems to be changing and shifting. The air is getting warmer, clocks are moving an hour ahead (a month earlier too), the Chief disappeared, and hey, even your very own Callboard tossed this crazy new blog thing into the mix! Still, one thing hasn’t changed at all with the coming of Spring: our constant urge to procrastinate. Actually, it has changed: it’s gotten worse now that the air is warmer.

It seems that just about anything can be put off. I know this for a fact: this column was supposed to be in a week ago and appear on Sundays, and here I am writing it on Sunday night a week late. A good friend of mine is in a Rhetoric class where they have to watch horror movies every week. Yes, their homework is to watch movies. She puts it off until midnight. I recently applied to the College of Communications, and a requirement on the application was an essay up to 500 words. For all you word-counting addicts out there, you know that’s basically nothing. I wrote my essay the night before the application was due, a quality example of my dedication to my future.

It’s not hard to think of other stories. The twenty-page research paper you started the day before it was due, the huge exam in the class you never go to that you started studying for three hours before it started... the list goes on.

The real question here is, why do we put things off so much? What exactly is it that so often keeps us from doing things that are often not really that difficult or time-consuming? It can’t just be that we have better things to do: sure, we could hang out with our friends, do something that actually interests us or do something else enjoyable AND productive, but how much of our time is wasted on Facebook, randomly surfing the internet or watching tv?

Judging from my experience, the most common cause of procrastination is not having something better to do but rather the fear of actually starting our work in the first place. Indeed, it seems like once we actually get started on our work, it isn’t that horrible. Actually getting going is the hard part.

And, with so many distractions, who could blame us? It’s been warm out for the last few days, and I plan to start wearing shorts again and to not worry about all that “school stuff” going on quite so much.

James Vandeberg
Journalism