The Clock is Ticking

You inspect a tiny sticky note on your desk, a gentle reminder of an upcoming assignment you hold close to yourself.

"EZ assignment. That's no big deal, I have a whole month to deal with this."

You say to yourself as you bury this sticky note into obscurity.

You HAD a month to do it, but inevitably, time rolls around. You are now standing at the edge of the 11th hour. You flail your mouse and pounce on your keyboard in a vague attempt to scribe some semblance of a draft that you can hope to present to your professor. So you hit enter... but now it's too late.

Again, no big deal. That's only 5% of your grade after all. Why don't you focus on this similar upcoming deliverable, since now the stakes are higher...

"I missed it the first time, but I have learned my lesson. I should give myself at least twice as much time to do this one."

You live up to your word. Now you are standing at the edge of the 10th hour instead. Surely you have bought yourself enough time to submit it properly... Right?

You did not understand the background material well enough to craft something meaningful out of it. All and any help you could get is far out of reach right now.

"Welp... I guess I have to wing it then".

You keep your notes open on the side as you try to decipher long paragraphs that seldom drop any useful hints on how to approach these problems. You do somehow manage to criss cross a bunch of the textbook gibberish, but none of the problems make sense. The professor wanted you to understand various edge-cases that may arise in these calculations, and this assignment was a stress test for how well you can deal with those. Now with no idea or approach in mind on how to even deal with the basics, you bite the onion once again, and time bleeds out.

Congratulations! Now you are left with another stain on your course evaluation.

But third time's the charm of course. This time you can change the outcome right?

Days go by once again as you willfully surround yourself with all sorts of distracting indulgences, but now you can hear a faint voice echoing underneath that huge heap of your already numbed thoughts.

"Perhaps I should get it over with and enjoy the rest of my day."

A powerful realisation for sure. Too bad that it is now met with an unexpected commitment that eats up your entire day. Off you go, as you take another L for the course.

"Not this time. I am done procrastinating. I will put an end to this once and for all. I have no commitments, no additional work to do, so now I will focus all my energy into this as soon as possible."

You are now determined. You acknowledged the issue at hand, and so without hesitation, the first thing you do when you get back home is pulling out the next assignment. After all, you have nothing better to do anyways.

(So just like in your favourite cliche movie, now the protagonist is going to win by the sheer power of determination and grit... Or is he?)

You stare at your work for hours, unable to comprehend what is going on. Your mind is still subconsciously fixated on the shows that you are missing out on, or the games you could be playing, but you sit there, trying to spin your cogs as hard as possible. Deep down, you regret all of those previous choices, and there's a looming threat of a failed course gripping your throat harder than it ever did before. It is truly an all or nothing scenario at hand here. Even though you have enough time, evidence from your previous performances suggests that it is magically too late to even begin right away.

You are trying to get yourself to be as prepared as possible for this assignment. You are now frantically flicking your eyes and wiggling your hands through tabs and sheets, trying to do everything at the same time. You want to ace this assignment to have a shot at passing the course, so you must max out on all the information needed for it. Trial and error is not an option anymore.

But none of it was making sense at all despite doing so many things. Perhaps getting some rest should help you kickstart tomorrow with better odds.

Verily you wake up the next day, met by the same dread that's been piling up by the virtue of that one particular assignment. You still want to get it over with, and you still want to make a perfect submission, so you still have a lot of catching up to do, and since you have all this catching up to do, you decide it is only fair to cease everything else, and focus solely on this. You now attempt to sacrifice your other classes and commitments so that you can get this out of the way. But even so, you are still inert as ever. "I am so stupid, I can't do this." richochets through your mind repeatedly reminding you of your past inadequacies. So you stop your multitasking to do some self-reflection. But even this spirals out of control quickly. You put off this work trying to get your head in the right space to even begin dissecting the task at hand. You want to make sure A is perfect before moving to B, because B depends on A, and similarly you need to make sure B is perfect before moving to C... and all you have is a leaning tower of crippling perfection-debt. Oh, and did we forget that you were putting off God-knows-how-many-things over this silly contraption of yours?

You dive into a frenzy as you load up excusefinding.exe and jam to some complaining.mp3

"This assignment is too hard. They should give us more time."

"I am very bad at <insert subject/topic thing>. That's why I am struggling so much with this current assignment."

Regardless of your complaining and trying to reason with your momentary inadequacy, time persists with a firm emotionless march, and you find yourself back at the "one day remaining" mark. This is when the internal "everything must be perfect" monkey shuts off, and you do what you have to do. You pull out the assignment. You don't know how to do it still, but you now know that it did not matter whatsoever. You get this innate sense of clarity which prompts you to get at least some of it done now, but its submission-o-clock, and you are prepared to drop another stinker at your professor's doorstep. You can only pray for part marks given your circumstance. And now, the dazzling tempest of all that other work that you have been laying off for this can safely crash onto your shoulders. Where did your inadequacy go during the most pressing times?

Congratulations for actually working hard this time and mustering up all that willpower, but unfortunately for you my friend, you ironically indulged in the worst possible kind of procrastination out there. You accumulated all of the stress, spent all of your time exhausting yourself in a manhole, but still you ended up accomplishing EVEN LESS than what you would have if you divided your attention among everything. It is truly a remarkable feat. Your brain tricked you into being very counterproductive because of your vapid benchmarks for progress with your work. You weren't stupid, you were just outsmarted and sabotaged by an entity that has been absorbing your actions as patterns, and you would be tempted to reason this as a valid excuse as well, when it is all entirely preventable if you just choose to ignore its conclusions about you, and suppress the noise it boasts so aggressively to keep sabotaging you.

At this point you could celebrate your loss in full force heading towards your exams, as you see well-prepared faces with stress free foreheads that weren't dragged into this rambunctious game that you had to suffer with. They got more done in less, and it is valid to now shake your fist in the air trying to elicit some sort of divine revolution from this gesture...

But what makes your contraption even more insignificant is the fact that, no matter what you do, whether you are an ascended procrastinator, productivity freak, or just a normal person, there was no win or loss here, since they are all fabrications, or temporary constructs that do not exist a few timeskips ahead (though you can still certainly accumulate the consequences of your losses, depending entirely on your personal goals and challenges that life threw at you). All of this was simply a showreel demonstrating time's lasting effects on you as a person. Maybe you see some patterns here. You thought you had no free time in school, it doesn't get better when you get a job. No time to spare in your job, it doesn't get much better when you become a parent, and the list goes on. Sadly, you can't ever rewind said showreel and make amendments. You can only live in the moment and watch it unfold.

The central point I want to bring amidst all of this cathartic yapping is that time does not falter, regardless of how you use it. I am aging (gradually), and so are you, and it is becoming more and more apparent with the dynamic shift what life wants from me, and how wasteful I have been with my time so far. We are all finite beings, and we could perhaps use that as a driver for trying to do something worthwhile in our pathetic boring lives. Maybe this article resonates with others in a similar boat as me.

In any case, I hope you enjoyed wasting anywhere from 4 to 10 minutes trying to read this, because those are 4 to 10 minutes that you are NEVER going to get back, as gloomy as it sounds.

The clock is still ticking as we speak...