School Skills 101: Procrastination

It's your knowledge guru here, back for more wisdom sharing.  If you're new to the class, catch yourself up with our first lecture on the art of the study sheet.

Studying is hard.  All you want to do is go have a nap, or have a 10 hour Seinfeld marathon, I get it.  I've been there too.  You've got a test tomorrow and literally anything would be easier than learning your course material.  You're slogging your way through the readings because you know that procrastination is bad for you.  WRONG!!  You're overworking your brain; just check out this pie chart I've made to demonstrate my point.

If only there were more room for Teddy Roosevelt in your brain.

As you can see, you need to accommodate the schoolwork portion of your brain, and so rest periods are a necessity.  So how should you go about getting them?  You might be inclined to schedule periodic rest times to recharge your mental batteries, and then go back to studying.  That would be dumb though.  Boy, it's a good thing you have me here to help guide you to gurudom.  Prepare yourself for some prime guru'ing.

Scheduling rest times means that your brain has to designate a portion of its think-stuff (add that to your vocabulary list; there will be a test on it soon) to keeping track of when your rest times begin and end.  There's no need to be so mentally inefficient.  Instead, you need to learn the art of the spontaneous procrastination.

This is your sensei.

Spontaneous procrastination (S.P.) is a technique that is far more nuanced than one might think.  Sure, you've probably procrastinated before, but it's likely been at the novice level (an S.P. level of 1-4); giving 30 minutes of your time to watching George take an IQ test, or scouring Facebook for a few hours, looking at every picture in a 200 photo album belonging to a stranger who is mutual friends with that one person you met once and added.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Operating at a novice S.P. level is perfectly acceptable, after all, statistically speaking, procrastination is how you found, and why you are reading this article.  Once you've mastered a level 4 S.P., however, you should begin challenging yourself.

I'll walk you through an example intermediate S.P. (level 5-8) exercise.  It is necessary that one has a beard for this.  Guys, if you don't, then your first procrastination exercise should be to grow one.  Be sure to track progress in a journal and calculate at what rate of growth you are progressing.  This should keep you occupied for a while.  Girls, testosterone injections are one option, but a washable-marker-beard will suffice.

Darkest Timeline beards are also acceptable.  But only as a last resort.

When the desire to procrastinate hits, shave (or wash, in the case of marker-beards).  But don't shave clean, just periodically change the beard whenever you're burnt out from studying.  What makes this an intermediate S.P. level is that you're able to track your procrastination in units that don't correlate with time.  Whereas with Seinfeld you might watch 3 episodes (an hour and a half), or with Facebook you might be on there for 2 hours, at this level of S.P., you can keep track of procrastination via the use of photos.  Observe:

Hey, that ended up not half bad...

Oh god, nevermind.  That got hideous quickly.

Muttonchops should always be in style

My face feels naked.  Time to break out the washable marker and start over.

Guru fact: your image of a guru probably has a beard for exactly this reason.

Should you master intermediate S.P., you can progress to level 9: Expert.  In this level, your procrastination time is utilized to create a ranking system for procrastination, with an in-depth detailing of where different procrastination techniques rank in relation to each other, and why.  Once you've accomplished that, you will be one step closer to being a knowledge guru yourself.

Now you can go back to studying, with the knowledge that your brain is ready to fully delve into your coursework.