"Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now."
The author of this quote may have been too lazy to sign his name, but his point still stands: laziness pays off now. Because of this, I’m here to give you five reasons why you should procrastinate.
Reason one: Procrastination is fulfilling now.
We all know that we’d much rather watch TV, talk to our friends about the funny thing that happened in our last class, or take a nap than write that boring paper on the life of Napoleon. So why not? You know that you can write the paper an hour or two from now and still get to bed by 3:00 a.m., so take a break - you deserve it, after all. You’ve had classes all week and partied all weekend. Isn’t it time you took some time out just for you? Go ahead and go out for a late night snack; you’ll get some much-needed nourishment from the nacho bar and have time to talk with your friends about how much homework you still have to do. If you’re tired now, take a nap. Who cares if it’s 10:30 at night - you should sleep for a while now so that when you get up you feel more alert and can do better work. After all, isn’t personal wellness more important than grades in the long run? A's won’t matter if you sacrifice sleep time to do work, end up with mononucleosis and have to spend a month out of class anyway. In fact, if you had procrastinated, you would’ve been healthier from all that extra sleep and actually spent more time in class.
Reason number two: In the long run, you actually end up doing less work.
I like to think of procrastination not as putting a task off until the last minute, but rather as allowing myself a set amount of time in which to do my work. If I start my homework early, it can stretch on for days and days because I space it out between now and when it’s due. If I do it the night before, however, I suddenly become more efficient. I don’t worry about writing my paper on the life of Napoleon steadily over the course of a week – I write it in one night and worry about making it sound like I wrote it steadily over the course of one week. Not only do I get (almost) the same letter grade, but I also save myself an entire week of working on a boring paper for no practical reason.
 The third benefit of procrastinating: You can always use unfinished work as an excuse to get out of something you don’t really want to do later on.
A lot of non-procrastinators say that they do their work ahead of time so that they can get it out of the way and have the rest of their time to relax, but we all know that if you’re sitting around not really doing anything, someone will ask you if you’re busy. If you have all of your work done, you’ll say "no," and invariably find yourself with another job to do. If you’ve been procrastinating, however, when asked if you’re busy, you can say that you’re sorry that you can’t help, but you’ve got a paper on the life of Napoleon to write. The same excuse will work when that annoying neighbor down the hall asks you if you want to study biology together in the lounge – just say that you’ve got a paper that you need to work on, and the pest goes away.
Reason number four for procrastinating: Eventually, you get more work done.
The funny thing about getting out of unwanted engagements or work is that you actually end up getting more work done. Take cleaning, for example. I hate cleaning. Absolutely hate it. But what do I do first when I’m putting off the Napoleon paper? I vacuum, hang up clothes, scour the sink, or even dust to avoid the dreaded paper for as long as humanly possible. It doesn’t just stop with cleaning, either. When I’ve exhausted my cleaning resources and my room is spotless, I resort to other menial tasks – you know, sharpening pencils, walking down the hall to get a drink of that lovely fountain water, writing threatening notes on my friends’ message boards. And when that too gets old, I fall back on the unthinkable: I do other homework. Other easier homework that I know I can stop doing whenever I’m sick of it because it’s not due for another two whole days. Sure, it’s not always the most important work, but you get to become known as the girl who writes threatening notes on other peoples’ message boards, and we all know that’s a title of high honor.
The fifth reason for procrastinating: Making time for your friends.
Why would you want to hole up in your stuffy dorm room and work on homework when you could be playing euchre in the lounge until midnight? Making new friends is a large portion of the "college experience," after all. Homework is just impeding on that valuable relationship-building time. You need to get out and mingle a little with the other people on your floor, work on building up your social skills some. You can’t possibly get the kind of satisfaction from writing a decent paper that you get from just sitting around and doing random things with your friends. Face it – people are more fulfilling than term papers. Everyone knows this, so why should we be expected to spend the majority of our time working on what’s less important in the long run? Yeah. I can’t think of a good reason, either.
So there you have them – the five reasons why you should procrastinate. So start procrastinating now to reap the benefits of your new bad habit. Actually, forget that. Don’t start procrastinating now. You can put it off until later.
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