By Aaron Thies

I am a chronic Procrastinator. It is a recurring affliction that does more harm than good; it’s something I could learn to control, but in all fairness I don’t want to stop procrastinating.  Procrastination injects drama and tension to otherwise boring tasks such as chores, homework, and anything else that can be put off until the last minute. To procrastinate, in essence, is to battle the clock, to make every second count, to achieve a level of efficiency that you would normally never reach.

When put under the stress of an assignment due in two blocks, time starts to slow down while your thought processes speed up. Everything is like The Matrix when you “bullet time” through hallway traffic to make it to the library. Typing speed is doubled, all outside distractions are muted, and the only thing that matters is to type that lab report for physics and nothing else. It is truly one of the great feats of the human mind, probably inherited from my cavemen ancestors whose every second was dedicated to the survival of their cave tribe. An amazing ability, which was used to kill woolly mammoths and run away from bloodthirsty saber tooth tigers, is now being used by a 17 year old trying to get through high school.

Through procrastination, you not only learn to deal with pressure, a skill that will come in handy during big tests and college exams, but you also have all the time  in the world to do whatever you want. Go online, play that video game, hang out with your friends, or just do nothing; you can do it all with procrastination. It may not be practical, but the alternative is pretty boring.

Over the years, I’ve been told by a lot of teachers and my parents that you should always get your homework done before the day it’s do and that procrastination will be the death of my scholarly career. Why they say that I don’t know. Procrastination is the American dream; when you procrastinate you’re setting your own limits and guidelines. You take your future in your own hands, becoming the master of your destiny. If I were to write my own dictionary, when you look up the definition of freedom it would have procrastination listed as one of its synonyms… right next liberty, but before deliverance.