Most people have gone to the fields of procrastination at least once in their academic lives. Some do it because they have to catch the latest episode of Fringe, others put off their math homework just to capture the enemy nexus using their godly Level 30 champion.

Most people do it every once in a while. Others incorporate it into their everyday lives and consider it a massively useful talent. They have the art of procrastination down to a science. You might call these people, high functioning procrastinators. I am one of those people.

My brain functions better under pressure. Being in the honours class pretty much all my elementary years, I got used to the stress of multiple tasks at hand. I usually put off my to-do list until it fills half a page.

Getting tasks done is an impulsive process in me. My brain has a switch that toggles between “slack off” and “work hard.” For instance, I have never found studying while listening to music effective; I either turn off my iPod and actually read the book, absorbing all information, or I throw away the book and rock hard to the beats of my playlist (which reminds me, I should really clean up my iTunes library).

Don’t even get me started on study techniques like the Pomodoro Technique, the supposedly effective method of taking a 5-minute break after 25-minute work periods. All that did was give me an excuse to sleep in with a half-finished essay and a half-eaten bowl of ramen. And when I awoke, the ramen was cold and the laptop was hot.

Frustrated, partly because of the cold bowl of ramen that I should have finished hours ago, I opened my planner and crossed out the Pomodoro Technique as a method of time management. So I tried a different approach and made a timetable to organize my daily tasks. The timetable thing was an utter failure. But I started to convince myself that “I am the master of the written word and no planner can command what I do with my life.”

It’s not that easy to change the time management methods a person uses, especially when their brain is hard-wired for either spontaneous cognitive work or spontaneous tomfoolery. The negative connotations that come with the word procrastination are not applicable to everyone. People like me put things off that should be done at an earlier time, but we still get the job done in time. For me, being under time pressure works. And most of the time, it is under time pressure that I come up with my good ideas, like this article (if this is published, then you know I’ve done an acceptable job).

In the end, the effectiveness of procrastination varies from person to person. For me, it’s not about how much time you have left after a job is done; it’s all about getting the job done. A rubbish piece of work that is done 5 days before the deadline is much less acceptable than something done well and just at the right time.

Procrastination is in the eye of the beholder. To self-help authors who make money off it, procrastination is a deadly disease that needs to be avoided. To me, it’s all about listing and organizing all your options, and tackling the urgent tasks first. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to work on my iTunes library.

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photo: Raisa Pezderic/The Sheaf