By Rafael Robledo

“To do this Assignment or not to do it?” is a question that you might have on a regular basis and it makes you less productive. Being productive as defined by the dictionary is “the effectiveness of productive effort”, as such as how much time you put in and how much you are able to accomplish can determine if you are productive or not. As students, we measure our productivity with the amount of homework or assignments that we can accomplish for our classes in a day, a week or so. 

Being productive is something that we always strive for, but often we procrastinate and get nothing done or are far less efficient at the last minute. Procrastination isn’t always as bad as you may think. It’s how you procrastinate that makes it either good or bad.

Passive procrastination is the bad procrastination that people usually partake in and they don’t get as much work done as they would’ve like to if they didn’t procrastinate. An example from my own life would be having a lot of homework, getting anxious on the amount of homework that is due and watching YouTube instead. This leads to me not starting my homework until 9:00 pm with everything being due at 12:00pm!! I know for a fact that what I will do in those 3 hours might not be good and the grade on that assignment will not turn out to be as great as it would’ve if I started earlier. Being passive is what makes you fail here and that is not what you want.

However, there’s active procrastination and this is the better form of procrastination. This type works for people that like to have the adrenaline rush and get more done while working under pressure. This works but I would not recommend doing this with a heavy work load because it will be easy to burn out and you might not do as good as well.

The way I would approach this would be by doing the heavy work first and leave the easy tasks that you have towards the end so that you can be more productive. An example would be what I did last week with my homework. I had computer science programs due and I knew that those would be very time consuming so I ended up starting Friday instead of last minute. I finished the programs Saturday and I left everything else for my other courses for Sunday since I knew that my homework for the other course were easier and less time consuming. With this strategy, I was more productive compared to if I left everything for last minute and then not accomplish anything at all. 

Now that you know the two concepts of procrastination, I hope that for this semester, you are actively procrastinating to be more productive and efficient with your workload. (OR not procrastinating at all!!)

To be passively procrastinating or to be actively procrastinating, that is the question that you will be asking now. I hope it’s the second option.