Roxy Hammond

If there’s any one thing I’ve learned from college, it’s that procrastination is an art form. One that takes many years to perfect.

Last year in my General Studies 143 class, the instructor asked me (one of the only sophomores) if students stop procrastinating as we climb the college ladder.

Wouldn’t that be a great concept? By the time you graduated, you would have completely stopped procrastinating.

That’s clearly not the case. Instead, as I told my instructor, we simply get better at it.

So now, three years into my college career, I am nowhere near finished procrastinating. In fact, I’m writing this column in my literature class mere hours before it’s due.

Of course, last year I would have been lucky to have an idea by today. Maybe I would have turned it in the day before it was printed.

See? I’m already getting better at putting things off until the last minute, but getting them done on time.

I mean, sure, it’s a good thing to get your stuff done in advance, so you’re not freaking out the night before it’s due because you didn’t budget your time. But seriously, who wants to do homework before that point anyway?

As you get older though, those freak-out sessions become few and far between. Not because you aren’t procrastinating, but because you know how it’s done.

Say you have two tests, a project and three chapters to read for next week. Starting Sunday night, you do the absolutely minimum amount of work to save your skin. You browse through the chapters and even consider opening up your notes to study. By the middle of the week (when there’s nothing good on TV), you start your project and also remember you have a test the next day. So you ditch the project and look over your notes for the test. By Thursday night you have managed the rest of your read, studying for a test, and finish up your project, all while making time to watch CSI.

Congratulations. You are a master procrastinator.

You haven’t been hanging around this school for years not to learn something from it, right?

Really, I think they should hand out bachelor’s degrees in procrastination. That’s what I feel I’ve earned, more so than a silly broadcast journalism or political science degree.

Strangely enough, I’ll probably use my degree in procrastination more than anything else I learn from this institution of education. Maybe that’s why college graduates get paid more. We have that sense of procrastination that only four years of schooling can produce. Some may even call it efficiency.

So I’ll finish this column and turn it in on time, much like the rest of my assignments. But I won’t do it any sooner than it absolutely has to be done.

After all, it was the great Mark Twain who said “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.” And he was absolutely right.

#1.884256:303082223.jpg:roxyhammond_cj.jpg:Roxy Hammond, Sarcastic Cynicisms:Charlie Johnson