Take the "Pro" out of Procrastination

Is writing worth all your time and stress? You're probably thinking, "Nah, I got better things to do," or you could be on the opposite end that believes, "Yes, writing is essential to the success of being a university student". Whichever student you are, you have some prior experience with procrastination, that God-awful word. Procrastination has several meanings for students. It can be from putting off an assignment until the very last minute of that 11:59 P.M. deadline or waking up from a nap while doing your homework or just lying to yourself that it is not important and can be done later. Before we get into further discussion, I want to make clear what procrastination is.

Procrastination is the outcome of having many distractions and events going on all at once. To get rid of the problem, you have to get to the root of it. Some people value their personal time and relationships more than their schoolwork, which pushes these people to not do their assignments. Others might be distracted from their constant use of their cell phones. Some people are just simply lazy and are not motivated enough to do their assignments. These are few of the reasons why one might procrastinate.

Everyone procrastinates one way or another; however, I am more intrigued as to why business majors take part in this process since I am very guilty of this action. I usually feel like an assignment is easy, and I just shove the assignment to the side and greatly underestimate its weight. When it comes down to the last minute, I get really stressed out and tired, which leads to a decrease in my writing performance. It also throws off my sleeping schedule, which is critical to my success in school. I want to be able to help students be more productive, save them many headaches, decline their lack of sleep, and not endure what I have endured. Which leads me to ask, "Why do business students procrastinate their writing assignments?"

College students are prone to procrastination, as made evident in the article "The Draws and Drawbacks of College Students’ Active Procrastination" Lauren C. Hensley decides that she wants to study why many students procrastinate. She goes and studies seven all-white, primarily undergraduate science majors in midwestern United States universities during spring 2013. She finds it is more beneficial to put the extra effort because in the long run it will pay off with higher quality work. The students falsely believed that procrastination helped motivate them, and although it can be used as a motivational factor, it was found that procrastination does not always go according to plan, and that it can place unnecessary amounts of stress on the students. The next article that I studied is called "Early birds Versus Just-in-Timers: The Effect of Procrastination on Academic Performance on Accounting students" by Aliza Rotenstein, Harry Z. Davis, and Lawrence Tatum. This article explores if submission times were in any way related to the grades the students received. They went and studied 297 graduate accountant majors from a prominent business school. They suggested that procrastination has some benefits because of the possible motivation some people might receive from it to do a task fast and accurate. This can lead to time efficient work strategies, but if students underestimate an assignment, they can be doomed. The last article is titled "What Is It We Do When We Write Articles Like This One—and How Can We Get Students to Join Us?" by Michael Kleine. Kleine claimed that students do not know how to write research papers. Kleine studied how different students in a library simply copied and pasted information from texts into their notes. He noticed that half of the time the students procrastinated seemed to be because they were unaware of what they were doing. He then created a diagram to study and guide his research for when he interviewed several of his colleagues who are professors. They were professors from humanities, both social sciences and sciences, and an English professor. He found they were alike in that, "they worked out of interest. They were different in that they recalled processes that varied not only according to discipline, but also according to personality and task". They focused on their fields and that was the major difference between them.

Students tend to focus more on their feels and other things which leads to procrastination and that can have a negative effect on overall performance compared to doing assignments early. According to Kleine, students struggled with research and his article was different because it revealed that students procrastinate their research since they do not know how to approach it. These researchers are credible, but they are not one hundred percent reliable. In Hensleys's article, she only studied white people and not others from different races. This can have a great impact on how different students with different backgrounds view school and their assignments. Also, almost all of them were science and none of them business majors. People of different majors have different approaches to assignments. In Rotenstein, Davis, and Tatum's article, they only focused on accountants. Although it might be more useful for my research, it is still extremely limiting as it only focuses on one set of business majors. Accountants are just a portion of the extensive piece. In Kleine's article, Kleine failed to do an in-depth study of the students and their perceived behavior. He mostly focused on professors. None of the professors were from the business field, so this research cannot be used to add onto business students' procrastination. He indirectly studied procrastination. His main goal was to research about how research is done. Another flaw about his research was that his evidence heavily relied on how others and himself felt about the issue. Business students' procrastination is important because it is a recurring problem that has yet to be solved.

Since my sources did not focus on business students and did not observe their behaviors, that led me to go out into the field myself and research to find possible information that could help me create an answer to my question. I know that I could help many business students and potentially other students with my findings because we all participate in procrastination. I hope to focus on the three common types of business majors: management, accounting, and finance. This allowed me to have a broader spectrum of the business fields. I also studied Latinos as they are usually underrepresented in these kinds of studies, and they are in large numbers here in the Rio Grande Valley. All the students are undergraduates since procrastination often hits them, and they are newer to the college experience compared to graduates and professors. They were specifically two 19-year-old males who were finance and management and a 19-year-old female who was in accounting and all were Hispanic/Latino undergraduates at UTRGV. I interviewed the three students with twenty-one questions to see how they procrastinate, and how they might feel on writing. I completed this study in a week after my starting point since I did not want to allow myself time to procrastinate on this assignment. Having a set schedule allowed me to stay on task as much as possible. I asked these questions one by one to the interviewee and allowed them 2-3 minutes to create a response and 5 minutes to deliver the response; however, if I felt they could continue adding information, then I allowed them to keep going. These are the questions that I asked in this order. After every question, I asked the interviewee to give an example for each situation and explain in detail as much as possible. These are the twenty-one questions that I interviewed students with:

As I interviewed each student, I jotted down as many notes as I could from what they were saying, and I mixed it with what exactly they were saying and my own words. After interviewing everyone, I realized that all of them procrastinated their writing assignments, which is what I already believed. Although some had similarities, they each had distinct reasons on why they procrastinated. The finance and accounting interviewees liked to separate their work into "pieces" while the management interviewee just did it "all at once" because he believed he would procrastinate if he did not use this option. They all believed they were "not strong writers" and that writing can sometimes be "annoying". The management and finance interviewees found some "significance in writing" while the other just "hated writing" and found "no purpose" in it. They all have multiple locations to choose from to do their assignments, but they tend to do it in "one area" most of the time. They all put more effort the closer the deadline is. They all like their English professors, but the female accountant interviewee cannot be convinced to like English. They all "put everything on hold" when they do their assignments. They all do their "work at night", and people are always around them when they work. The management male interviewee will put off his assignment by "overthinking", and the female interviewee will not do an assignment if she "hates it more than what [she] already normally [does]".

There are a variety of reasons the business students I interviewed procrastinate, according to them, the prominent issues were social media, texting, video services, or social events. Social media is uncommonly prominent because, according to my female interviewee, "it is easily accessible" regardless of where one is at because it is at the palm of one's hand. The finance male interviewee confirmed this by adding that "phones are a major part of everyday life". By being easily accessible, social media is easily abused and leads to the procrastination of important assignments, such as writing. The female interviewee spent "5-7 hours a day on social media," the finance male spent "3-4 hours a day on social media," and the management male spent "4-6 hours a day" on social media. If students spent as much time writing and perfecting their work as they did on social media, then a majority of students would have a doctorate's English degree. Texting is another big factor because it is also in the palm of one's hand. The female interviewee said that she, "could not help but text back" because she "felt bad not responding quickly". The more people one knows the easier it is to receive multiple texts and easily be distracted, which leads to procrastination. This was the case for my management male interviewee because he said, "I am in multiple group chats, so I get an endless amount of notifications that are really hard to ignore". Texting is like social media except it is mostly one on one conversations, so it is harder to put off or ignore. All interviewees told me that a significant other was their main reason to respond fast and get distracted. I feel like this plays a big factor since people are more worried about others than their writing assignments, which do not have any feelings. Video services from YouTube to Netflix have a wide range of options to choose from in terms of eye material. The female interviewee said, " I can't stop myself from watching Narcos because it is interesting. When I realize it too late, I notice that three hours have passed". The management male interviewee says that he watches "Z-Nation for at least 2 hours a day". These options make it harder to put them off as one will find something he or she likes and choose it over doing work depending on how strong their willpower is. However, Stranger Things has a better storyline than the everyday college kid struggle. Social events occur everywhere in the university, and it is sometimes difficult to stay at home or in your dorm because you want to get to know others and feel social and have good college experiences. At least that is the case for the male management interviewee when he said that he has "attended every big university event on campus over doing homework". Social events are probably the easiest to avoid, but they are pretty convincing once the host starts "throwing some free [university] items" such as shirts or even free food as was the case for my female interviewee. Free food always gets people to go to events, and I would personally eat free food than do my assignments, which only cause me headaches. All these factors pile up and lead to constant procrastination in students as they struggle to balance their social lives and work lives.

Learning how to manage one's work and social life can help many students be aware of their actions and how to try to prevent procrastination. It can help them avoid many of these actions in the early stages before it becomes an everyday habit, which are ridiculously hard to break. This can also be applied universally to other students in the university; however, I'm trying to help my fellow business friends. Many students are usually unaware of their procrastination until they hear someone else talk about or when they really ponder about it. I hope that my research allows you all to think about it and help avoid falling into the vicious cycle. It matters because it helps if you are trying to be self-aware of procrastination and possible influences or causes of it. It can also help bring awareness in other students who are not aware. This will hopefully encourage them to act upon it to avoid making the issue worse.

Decreasing procrastination can be done by lessening the usage of cell phones. It can help by setting time aside specifically for the assignment and trying to do it as soon as it is given to help avoid confusion and procrastination. Most students find that dividing and conquering their writing assignments helps a lot, and for those that do not believe in that, should finish their assignments as soon as they are given in one sitting. This will allow for better grades and less stressful nights before the day of a submission deadline. If an all-nighter with your paper is your way to tackle an issue, then go for it, but if not, then please divide and conquer it as it is a very viable way of doing your assignment.

Works Cited

Gallegos, Sam. Personal Interview. 2017.

Hensley, Lauren C. “The Draws and Drawbacks of College Students' Active Procrastination.” Journal of College Student Development, vol. 57, no. 4, 2016, pp. 465–471., doi:10.1353/csd.2016.0045.

Kleine, Michael. "What Is It Do When We Write Articles Like This One—and How Can We Get Students to Join Us?" The Writing Instructor 6 (1987): 151-61. Print.

Montemayor, Fred. Personal Interview. 2017.

Rotenstein, Aliza, et al. "Early Birds Versus Just-In-Timers: The Effect of Procrastination on Academic Performance of Accounting Students."Journal of Accounting Education, vol. 27, no. 4, Dec. 2009, pp. 223-232. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1016/j.jaccedu.2010.08.001

Santos, Frances. Personal Interview. 2017.