Read this…later

Eric Greenwood discards his long black coat and sits in a low, comfortable chair on the second floor of the Rochester Institute of Technology’s library. He seems slightly frazzled. Why? He was up until 2 a.m. working on a midterm then awoke at 7 a.m. this morning to get to class.

That would be Greenwood, a college student, procrastinating.

A mechanical engineering major, he endures a nightmarish workload: reading every night, numerical spreadsheets (“Lots of number crunching,” he says), five pages of probability and statistics work and pages upon handwritten pages of work for thermodynamics, design of machine elements and numerical methods classes.

“If you screw up on a test, you’re gone,” Greenwood says.

He says he’s gotten better at doing his homework on time, but as last night’s late night goes to show, there is no end to the lure of putting things off.

This is an all-too-typical scene among college students. Notorious for pulling all-nighters and for such energy boosters as eating coffee straight from the can (it happens), they are great at stressing out over work saved until the last minute.

Why does this happen? And what can be done about it?

Rita Emmett, author of The Procrastinator’s Handbook, has a theory about this. She calls it Emmett’s Law: The dread of doing a task uses up more time and energy than doing the task itself.

Emmett, a self-proclaimed “hardcore procrastinator,” says that it used to take her three evenings to pay her bills. Now she’s got it down to 45 minutes. She describes it as a cycle. Once you start putting things off, everything builds up and gets pushed back and back.

Distractions are also to blame. For Greenwood, computer-based classes are not a good idea. Once he sits down to do work on the computer, a myriad of distractions appear. At his fingertips are friends waiting to be talked to on IM, Web sites to explore, games (“that at any other time would be boring,” he says) to be played and news to check.

“There’s always an Internet connection. There’s always one more story, one more Web site, and it adds up,” he says.

The difficult thing about procrastination is that there is no one solution, no magic elixir that will rid the world of the problem forever.

“We know so little about why human beings do what they do,” says Michael Herzbrun, a psychological counselor at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, N.Y. “We all have issues, we all have anxieties.”

There are some, such as Emmett, who have put together theories—whole books—on the topic. Herzbrun says he hopes that if people choose to pick up a self-help book, they will come away from it with a tip or two that might work for them.

Greenwood says he doesn’t know how to stop procrastinating. “I don’t know if it’s so much a behavior as a character attribute,” he says. 

Emmett, however, practically screams into the phone when she hears this. Procrastination, she says, “is NOT a personality flaw. It is simply habit.” She says that people grow up as procrastinators if no one shows them how to do things differently. They continue into adulthood without knowing how to deal with their problem. But if they learn to confront it, they will be much better off.

Emmett offers a five-step technique that she’s developed. “Take the “STING” out of feeling overwhelmed,” she urges:
S            Select one thing you’ve been putting off.
T            Time yourself. (Emmett says to actually set a kitchen timer; the ticking 
              gives a sense of urgency.)
I            Ignore everything else you have to do.
N            No breaks allowed.
G            Give yourself a reward. (Your task is done, so have that cup of  
              coffee, watch that movie or call that friend.)

Linda Sapadin, author of Beat Procrastination and Make the Grade, sees things a little differently. Procrastination, says Sapadin, is not a disease that can be remedied. In her book, she puts forth six styles of procrastination (including the dreamer, the worrier and the perfectionist) and urges students to find out which style defines them. Only then can they begin to deal with their problem.

Greenwood, who tends towards condensing a week’s worth of work into one night, just has too much on his plate.

The ideal solution? “If professors would give homework twice a week,” Greenwood says. He smiles ruefully, acknowledging the futility of that hope.

Jen Graney is a senior at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, N.Y., and an intern for The Next Step Magazine.

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