By Sunghyun Bae, Siwon Baek
No matter how busy people are, they somehow tend to pour their energy into tidying their rooms or throwing away unnecessary receipts rather than tackling the tasks that need to be done immediately. Researchers explain this as “rational irrationality driven by emotion avoidance.” In other words, procrastination is not simply a habit but a consistent behavioral pattern exhibited in certain situations, and with the spread of digital environments, its frequency has become even more pronounced. So how can we overcome this behavior?
The apparent contradiction of procrastination is that we are actively doing something we do not want to do. Nobody wants to submit a late assignment, but we procrastinate nonetheless. Procrastination is not laziness, where you do not care at all. It is often a sign that you care so much about a task’s impact on your grades, sleep, and mood that you spend more time worrying about it than it would actually take to finish, because some part of you is simply afraid to begin.
The natural dissonance between short term and long term goals is one of the reasons that cause procrastination. The same person can want comfort, food, naps, short videos, talking to friends as well as a good GPA, less stress, and perhaps admission to a decent university. The uncomfortable truth is that the latter is usually not in control when decisions are made. It’s very easy to say things like “I will start later” and “I work better under pressure anyway,” which is often just another way of saying “I do not want to feel uncomfortable right now.”
Fear often hides behind gentle excuses about not being in the right mood yet. When an assignment or exam feels important, beginning causes the same kind of pressure like walking onto a stage with everyone watching. If you start late or never fully commit, you can always tell yourself that you would have done better with more time. You get to avoid confronting your own judgement. The quality of the work drops, but your pride feels safer for a while.
Lastly, is the unclear boundaries of tasks. The many problems we face in everyday life are grand and vague. Maintaining a good GPA, finishing this project, submitting school work, these all lack a clear first step, and it easily turns into a blurry mass of work you have to do. Your mind treats it as endless and heavy, naturally more daunting than anything like solve this problem or research this topic. Anxiety overestimates the work you have to do.
To weaken procrastination, the work in front of you has to become smaller and sharper. Instead of a vague plan to study, you decide to solve three specific questions from a certain page. Instead of thinking about the entire essay, focus on writing a single rough opening sentence. Once the task is shaped into specifics, it feels less like climbing a cliff and more like stepping onto the first stair.
A simple way to force that first step is the five minute rule. Tell yourself you will work on the task for five minutes and then stop if you want. You do not have to finish the worksheet or produce a good paragraph. You just have to get moving. Most of the time, once those five minutes pass, the fear shrinks and you keep going. Even on the days you stop, you still practiced beginning before you felt ready.
In the end, overcoming procrastination is less about waiting for motivation and more about acting despite discomfort. People rarely start when they feel perfectly calm and confident; they start while they are tired, anxious, and unsure. When you open the document or solve the first problem with your stomach still tight, you are training a skill you will need long after high school: the ability to move forward even when your emotions resist. Procrastination is not proof that you are lazy. It is your mind trying, clumsily, to protect you from stress and fear. Once you see that, you can stop asking what is wrong with you and instead quietly ask yourself what small action you can take in the next few minutes. The students who learn to answer that question, again and again, are the ones their future selves will be grateful to.