Procrastination has always been something that I’ve struggled with. Ever since I was little, I can remember pushing off assignments as much as I could.

This was always a problem. I remember when I was a junior in high school, I had a 10 page research paper that my history teacher had assigned. My paper was on the prohibition of alcohol in the United States in the 20th century. We were required to write 100 notecards worth of information based on our topic. Our teacher had us do this so we could organize the information we gathered on our topic better. I can remember the night before the notecards were due, I still had quite a few left. Our teacher had recommended we do 5 notecards a night in order to keep up, but of course I didn’t listen. I had to end up doing around 30 notecards in one night, which definitely took me into the early our of the morning to finish.

When it was time to write the paper, I found myself in the same situation. The night before it was due, I had around 4 pages left to write. Even with the amount of time I had to do it, which was weeks, I found myself in this situation again. I also procrastinated the last day, I didn’t start writing until 5 P.M. or so. Once I was finally done, with no more edits or corrections to make, it was 2:30 in the morning. I only slept 3 and 1/2 hours because I had to wake up at 6 for school.

The next day was tough. Going to school all day with very little sleep was definitely not easy. From this day forward I promised myself that I would work on procrastination. I knew that if this continued it would be a huge problem down the road. To this day it is still problem but it isn’t as problematic as before. I still wait to do assignments, but usually I can get the assignment done with time to spare.

The biggest thing that helped me was writing out my schedule for the week. I wrote down all of the due dates for my assignments and how long I should work on them each day. This way I don’t have an excuse not to do my work, since it is all planned out day by day and is very manageable. I get the work done that needs to be done and it saves me from saving all of my work until the last minute.