Sydney Life

Want proof? I’ve made a comprehensive list of all the different types of procrastination you can partake in. And then I wrote a blog about it.

So...

Firstly, I believe there are several tiers to procrastination. Level One includes activities that most people engage in to avoid work, at some stage or another. Level Two and Three are slightly more severe, Level Four is when it’s time to start getting really worried. Level Two can be thought of as the optimum level of procrastination, in the sense that it is mid-way between outright lazing around, and going completely out of your way not to do work (ie. other stuff actually gets done in the process).

Level One

Watching your fravourite show on DVD so many times that you become a walking quote machine of it. After I got Arrested Development on DVD, I managed to make almost everything anyone said become a segue (!) into a quote from the fabulous show. There was also a point where even my most obsessed Scrubs friends started to think I needed a life. Badly.

(Also related to previous point) Watching very clearly substance-free TV. This often happens when a show comes on right after the show you were watching (the other night it happened in a catastrophic downhill tumble of quality with Grey’s Anatomy -> What About Brian -> E! Special: top 25 sexiest bad girls. Naturally, I had two tests the next day). However, a bleaker outlook on your homework is definitely when you seek trashy shows, like Judge Judy/ Days of our Lives/ Play School (Daytime Chapter), or Passions/ Danoz Direct/ Up-Late with Hotdogs (Night-time Chapter).

Finding new and creative things to do on the internet:
Youtube. Ebay. Facebook. Googling your name. Googling your best friend’s name. Goodging your best friend’s boyfriend’s name. Enough said.

Level Two

Productive procrastination - working on an essay that isn’t due for another 3 weeks, just to avoid doing the essay that’s due tomorrow. Crosslisted with Productive Procrastination is the Organisation of Notes - a task involving arranging notes from all semester in order in a big folder, printing off all the extra readings and lecture notes, realising you’ve run out of lecture paper and dashing out to Officeworks to get some, getting distracted by the cordless mice and external hard-drives, then getting home a couple of hours later (pit stops at McDonalds, the beach, and a drive-in cinema), then, like, being whayy too tired to do any work.

Trying outfits on for upcoming events. I really hope I’m not the only one who does this, but sometimes when I’m studying I’ll check my diary and see when I’m going out next and try on clothes. Wow, that sounded incredibly lame and vain on paper. But this more often than not pertains to dress-up parties, for which I have to dig around my room/ kitchen pantry/ cupboard under the stairs to find accessories to suit the costume.

Helping around the house so much that your mum starts to wonder who you are, and what you’ve done with that daughter who would normally recoil at the sight of a vacuum cleaner. Self explanatory. Though I have been known to clean our toilet and offer to cook (not at the same time) during severe bouts of procrastination.

Level Three

Procrastinating from going to sleep: because the sooner you go to sleep, the sooner you wake up and the sooner you’ll have to face tomorrow. As I write this, Last Comic Standing is playing on my TV in the background, and if I wait just a few minutes longer I’ll get to watch that classic soap, Passions.

Procrastinating from procrastinating: I often decide that the weekend before a big assessment is due is the perfect time for my room to get a facelift. Then I get bored of that and spend all my time on facebook/ myspace/ msn/ staring at a wall. The consequence is that my room is now too messy to produce anything essay-worthy so I won’t do work. Possibly a fantastic example of the lose-lose situation.

The Learning Useless Information brand of procrastination: check out some of the things I’ve memorised over the years instead of doing work: The sign language alphabet. The 50 states in the USA. The first 50 elements on the periodic table. How to solve a Rubik’s cube. Currently I’m working on the teen-times tables, and the countries in Africa. I should have them perfected come STUVAC.

Level Four

Writing a blog compiling a multitude of ways to procrastinate, all based on personal experience. Oh.