why I couldn't write this essay

 What role does Procrastination play in your life?


Procrastination has greatly affected my life. In fact, it is affecting my life right now as I write this essay. As if writing this, it is 8:14 PM on March 26 of 2026, which is the day before the deadline. I did not start writing this essay until nearly 2 days had passed since the essay was assigned. 8PM might not seem like too late of a time, but my parents had made a rule weeks before that I was required to go to bed, or at least stop using any electronic appliances (like the computer I am using to type these words) before 10:00 PM on any given day. This rule was understandably made because I had been sleeping in class almost every day, due to the fact that I had consistently been staying up past midnight nearly every night, which was caused by procrastination.

Procrastination has made it so that I complete projects more slowly than I would like, and I think that effect is shown clearly with my experience with this very essay. I was hoping to finish the essay yesterday on March 25th, but I hadn’t even gotten to the stage of finding a topic to write about. I looked at all the prompts posted onto the assignment page but none of them gave me any idea of something to write about. Some were too general for me to think of any specific topic out of the very many that apply to them (like “What could you live without?”), some were just things I had never thought about and therefore didn’t have anything to say about them (like “What can older people learn from your generation?”), and many were about family in some way, which are the ones I have used in my previous essays, but my family simply isn’t interesting enough to make another essay about. I did try some ideas, like to use one of the prompts written on the board from our discussion of “American Like Me” (by Viet Thanh Nguyen), but after I started writing, I wrote everything I had to say about the topic of my national identity in only a few sentences.

This deficiency of ideas made me lose motivation, and I turned to true procrastination a few minutes into Wednesday’s work time. While I was procrastinating, however, I was convincing myself that I was, in fact, still working on the essay and that I could switch back to the essay tab anytime. This is typically what happens when I get stuck on an assignment and it results in me not doing anything else for prolonged periods of time because in my mind, I’m working on an assignment. Procrastination often has side effects for me aside from just not getting the assignment done early. For example, because of me spending so much time on “doing” this assignment, I couldn’t work on my creative projects, work on other homework, or reply to the many messages my friends sent me.

I know procrastination isn’t good and I have tried to stop it multiple times. However, every time, I improve for only a few days and quickly go back to how I used to be. I don’t know why exactly procrastination is so difficult to fix for me. My mother thinks it is because I’m not serious enough about it, and that I’m not thinking of the consequences of procrastination. I’ve never been sure if that was the case, but perhaps she is right. By writing this essay and reflecting how procrastination changes my life, I think I have a better understanding of what procrastination entails for me and how it happens. My hope is that the writing of this essay at least somewhat improves this habit of mine.

Comments

  1. JordanApril 1, 2026 at 8:57 AM

    Hi Hector, I really enjoyed reading your essay and felt myself relating more and more as I kept reading. Your way of connecting your procrastination to this essay is really well done especially in how you connect it to the brainstorming process and the actual writing process. I also really enjoyed reading about your mindset when it comes to not doing anything because you're "doing" the assignment you're procrastinating on (and found myself relating a little too much.) If I had to give you any advice, I would only suggest adding a little bit more explaining how you were feeling and what you were thinking of when writing this essay. Maybe you could talk about the stress of having a 10pm cut off and not starting until 8 or talk about how you were dreading doing this assignment up until 8. All in all, I don't really have much to critique other than add a little bit more experience to balance out the reflection.

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