It’s the end of the month, and your assignments are almost due. You are probably looking back at all the time you have wasted watching tv shows, movies, and even scrolling through TikTok. You are filled with those feelings of shame and inadequacy and thinking to yourself “I could’ve finished all my assignments early on, but I chose not to!”. Well, congratulations, you identify as a procrastinator, the world is burning to the ground while you discover what your empty fridge has to offer. But no, I’m not here to make you feel guilty about all the wasted opportunities, or all the time you could’ve spent with your family instead of playing video games. Procrastination is a habit that each and every person experiences throughout their lives. People may choose to delay an important task, focus on less urgent things, or do nothing at all about their lives. However, procrastination is costly, and has probably cost us more than we could afford at some point in time. Understanding procrastination may help you identify the things you have lost, what could’ve been, and how to shift your way around it.
Procrastination could lead to many barriers down the road. Those barriers could affect your productivity and give you a false idea of the opportunities you are losing. Furthermore, technological advancement could contribute to procrastination, yet we can’t give it the complete blame.
Loss of productivity.
It’s parents meeting time, and your parents are navigating through the school hearing the same thing from teachers “your son is so smart, and he could achieve more by putting in more work”. Procrastination affects the productivity of individuals greatly, and the implications of that are almost chronic. Think of it as a domino effect, once it starts, it could get hard to halt. The ideal procrastinator would start off his day with a yawn that extends to his workplace. The effect of procrastination on work could materialize in lower pay and a horrible HR report by the end of the month. When the same pattern is repeated, your productivity drops greatly, and the potential for higher income and a better, more comfortable life respectively drops.
As long as procrastination prevails, moral and motivation to get things done will never improve. The long-term implications of procrastination are also disastrous. By time, you might find yourself struggling with incomplete tasks, poor decision making, poor time management, and even perfectionism or fear of failure. Moreover, procrastination is the enemy of new businesses. Due to the quick pace of the business world, a lot of new businesses fail in their early years. New and small businesses can’t afford to waste time, and time is money in that context. When businesses start off slow, they will find themselves missing crucial milestones towards success. This is damaging to the process of building recognition and distinctiveness in the market and could also lead to defaulting on their loans.
“Innerer Schweinhund”
The German term “Innerer Schweinhund” translate to inner pigdog or inner bastard and is used to address the struggle of overcoming laziness and procrastination. Understanding your inner bastard could help greatly in understanding the opportunity cost losses that are created through procrastination. Opportunity cost is one of the fundamental pillars of economics, and its relationship with procrastination is simply not to be overlooked. To simply put it, opportunity costs are the benefits people miss out on when they choose to adopt an alternative course of action. let’s say you have assignments due in a week, and you choose to waste that week following the footsteps of some fancy food blogger.
You visit every restaurant he goes to, nibble on some ridiculously delicious food, and spend so much money just to find yourself cornered by the end of the week with only your assignment title written. You start beating yourself over and regretting each bite of that juicy burger, knowing that you could have finished the assignment early on at the start of the week. The effect of the wasted opportunities hit you later on when your not-so-shiny grades are out. Every minute spent procrastinating, you sacrifice professional advancement, personal growth, or even a chance to pursue your passions. Those unseen opportunities will be potentially lost, and the temporal comfort caused by procrastination will allow for massive opportunities to slip between your fingers.
Did you see that new TikTok trend!
Technology has allowed us to complete our tasks faster than ever before, with the introduction of the internet and smart phones, things couldn’t have been this easy. However, technology is a double-edged sword, and while it makes it swift to have access to information, it could be pretty time wasting. Take social media as an example, a procrastinator would spend hours upon hours watching useless videos and catching up with the latest TikTok trends. Social media procrastinating sucks you into this hellish loop where videos play one after the other, and you won’t realize the amount of time wasted until too late. Social media procrastination could lead to serious issues that would chronically affect your life, these issues include a horrible academic performance, financial issues, a degrading physical and mental health, and most importantly a high opportunity cost. The developed low self-esteem and anxiety contributed to social media procrastination are enough to hurdle your development in life and could lead to firing from the workplace and low increases in income.
Conclusion
“Shake it off” by Taylor swift might be the most important motivational video out there. The song concludes the solution to the procrastination issue. Of course, the solution to such issue is more layered than just shaking your ass off the bed and starting to go on with your day. Realizing the high opportunity cost that lies behind procrastination is extremely important in your fight against this filthy habit. The realization that every moment spent wasting your time doing nothing propels us towards a more productive lifestyle. The time wasted procrastinating could have been channeled towards a better investment in yourself through learning new skills or even seeking new job opportunities. Learning new skills and improving yourself is key to new financial opportunities and long-term personal growth.