Procrastination has grown rather common for students especially nowadays. As a school student myself, it seems as if procrastination has become a part of my everyday life. It feels like a disease infected my brain horribly. Procrastination, is basically the art of losing focus on the task at hand or to delay/postpone something.  In my case, homework is that something. Even now, my nine-year old brother in fourth grade has the mind of a procrastinating middle schooler. Watching Youtube and playing games on his laptop has kept him from homework until the next morning at breakfast when he tries to eat cereal in one hand and finish his math homework with the other. Yes, this is what it has come to. Though procrastination has many horrible effects, some students may find it easier to rush things and do it last minute because they may work better under pressure. Although, this statement fails to consider that procrastination would still come up with negative results most of the time.

There are many negative effects of procrastination. Frankly, I haven’t heard of many positive ones besides maybe getting to relax after a long day at school. That is still no excuse for not doing your homework. When coming home from school, students often like to rest before getting a start on their homework. When the time for homework comes, the urge to open facebook or play a game on the computer is too irresistable. Soon enough, homework is incomplete and left to be done later in the night, too late to be healthy for a young person or child. It has been said that nine hours of sleep is the minimal amount of sleep a child from the ages twelve to eighteen should get. Some children who stay up either to do homework or for other reasons receive much less sleep. This becomes quite unhealthy for the child. Some may even get dark circles under their eyes. I know I have had dark circles. These are some of the reasons why procrastination is a horrible habit of students.

Although procrastination is meant to be a time where you relax and lose concentration, it has the power to build stress. Well how wouldn’t it build stress? Delaying homework time until the night before can put a lot of pressure and stress on you, especially when it is a class project. You start to feel rushed and have to finish things quickly which results in sloppy work. According to an article on WebMD, associate professor of psychology at Carleton University in Canada, he made observations that students who put things off more would most likely sleep less and eat more poorly. This evidence proves that students who tend to procrastinate more also become more sloppy, unorganised and unhealthy.

Over the years, advanced technology have been able to provide us with brand new, multi-tasking devices such as the iphone, ipad, etc. They play a big role in procrastination and have become a big problem for some people. These devices have also become very common among elementary, middle and high school. Yes, elementary students as well. Electronics have also been responsible for poorer eyesight for students as well as less rest. “The longer you look at a computer screen, the more eye strain you tend to have, which can cause headaches”, says Douglas Lazzaro, MD, professor and chairman in the Department of Ophthalmology at SUNY Downstate Hospital in Brooklyn, N.Y from an article on everyday health.  Aside from procrastination being unhealthy for all students, procrastination has no good effect on grades. With homework handed in late or incomplete, the teacher would obviously grade it lower. You never know, this could affect your grade much more than it would seem. Especially in some schools where grade standards are higher than others. This could also lead to trouble or detention with the teacher of your subject. A personal experience of mine would have been in seventh grade when I had a class presentation to prepare. I left it until the night before to build the project and start on my presentation. It became very stressful and I was more nervous than I usually am when publicly presenting in front of other people.

Although, a strong case could be made that procrastination is just a small distraction and does not have big effects on students and is not a big deal. According to an article on Smithsonian, Frank Partnoy argues that the key to success is waiting for the last possible moment to make a decision. This argument fails to talk about how procrastination also has negative impacts to the student but also does not explain how it is ‘good’ for students besides the fact that making decisions at the last minute is a good skill to have. This statement may be convincing and does technically show the good side to procrastination, one can still be able to outweigh the consequences to the positive effects.

To conclude, procrastination is a bad habit that students should stop doing because it may cause health issues, failing grades, a poorer education and a large amount of stress. Although a strong case could be made that procrastination is not as bad as it seems and in the future doing things under pressure would be a useful skill, this fails to see both sides of the situation and show the consequences of procrastination. It also fails to explain how exactly procrastination can be good for students. Possible solutions such as, parents setting a time limit to how long they are allowed to use electronics and setting a certain goal to achieve within a time limit then giving them a break in between.