My Worst Enemy

                Looking back on my middle/high school experience so far, I’ve come to realize that despite the countless things that have changed over the past couple of years, there’s one thing in my life that has somehow remained constant: my procrastinating ways. I know for a fact that I developed this bad habit in middle school since it was then that I had to learn to prioritize some work over others because of the advanced classes that I was taking. I mostly prioritized my work based on their deadlines, and this wasn’t really a bad thing since I’m pretty sure that’s how everyone prioritizes their work. The problems, however, came when I started to just do whatever task is due the next day and didn't bother to work ahead on tasks due at a later date. Eventually, I began to put off more work until the last minute and I kept telling myself that I do it because “I work better under pressure.” Really it was just laziness and lack of motivation.

I’ve spent so much all-nighters trying to get done projects that I’ve had weeks to do and I always do great in them because the added stress of the coming deadline just motivated me to work harder, faster, and better. I’d always spend my weekends trying to forget about homework then freaking out Sunday evening because I had so much to do, then I’d tell myself it would be the last time I’d procrastinate but come the next weekend, I just do the same thing all over again. To me, the weekend is for relaxing after such a hard, stressful week and I’d always hate it when teachers would assign a ridiculous amount of homework for the weekend like they WANT us to suffer and not have a life (Mr. Nguyen).

Basically, I procrastinate on everything and is the reason why I’m sitting here, typing this on the last hour of my birthday and why I only got two hours of sleep last night which caused me to feel like a zombie today. It’s senior year and I really want to get this right. My goal is to finally break my procrastinating habit even though I’m obviously not doing very well in reaching that at the moment, but it’s hard to get anything done ahead of time when you’re drowning in school work and extracurricular activities. I do know that the first step is to find motivation to do work ahead of time and using whatever free time I have to get things done rather than just sit and watch T.V. I have to really work on my time management, and if any of you have advice, I’d greatly appreciate them.

Mary Muro