Our world has made procrastination normal. 

It’s led many of us into a seemingly endless spiral. We wait until the last minute to do everything all at once right before it’s due and then need so long to recover from the exhaustion that the cycle repeats itself seemingly forever. 

Procrastination is a self-fulfilling prophecy that many find hard to escape. It’s a miserable process that eats up time and is no way to live. 

It’s so much easier to continue this cycle than it is to fix it, though. Idle time is the devil’s workshop, and we live in a world where boredom is more avoidable than almost any other feeling. With constant access to entertainment and stimulation, it is fully possible to scroll and procrastinate until our eyeballs fall out. 

Procrastination feels like an inevitable reality of life, especially in college.

Liza Meredith, licensed psychologist and teaching focus professor at the University of Minnesota, said she’s seen how common it is. 

“I’ve taught at the University of Minnesota for eight years, and in one of my first psychology lectures, I almost always ask students, ‘Have you procrastinated?’” Meredith said. “Basically, the whole time I’ve worked here, people have said yes. So it’s really common and normal.”

We begin by not doing our work until the day of the deadline, then we escalate into avoiding our problems until they become unavoidable. Procrastination is far-reaching and may lead many into an existence of distraction and stasis, where life becomes a constant dopamine chase. 

Procrastination is the theft of our lives by nobody other than ourselves. 

However, certain enterprises stand to benefit greatly from this self-sabotage and even encourage it through dopamine-hacking technology and addictive interfaces. I’m talking about social media.

The time we lose doesn’t just disappear. On these apps, time is money.

According to Meredith, procrastination is often exacerbated by digital distractions because of the way our phones and the internet hack our brain chemistry.

“There’s always something enticing to look at on our phones that’s probably impacting our reward system in our brain more so than the tasks that we’re supposed to be doing,” Meredith said. “I think it’s really easy to get caught up in something sort of mindless and easy versus doing the thing that takes more cognitive effort.”

The more time we spend on an app or website, the more time the algorithms can obtain data based on our interactions to sell to advertisers who then sell products back to us, and we’ll spend more time seeing these advertisements.

While we have nobody to blame for our procrastination, we are playing right into the hands of people who stand to profit from these habits. This makes procrastination not only normalized but incentivized for both our brain’s reward system and social media companies.

A lot of it can boil down to brain chemistry and social media, but it also has a lot to do with everything outside of the dreaded work itself. If it becomes enough of a problem, life itself becomes merely an existence of two modes: work and avoiding work.

There is no time or capacity for actual relaxation or downtime because we’re always being watched by the faster-approaching deadlines behind them and, as a result, living in constant fear and dread. By delaying work in this way, procrastinators put off not only the task itself but the true enjoyment of life outside of one’s obligations and responsibilities.

It’s a slippery slope.

On a larger scale, it makes sense. Procrastination makes it normal to write off problems until they’re entirely too big to deal with and need immediate attention. It’s in part caused by the importance of day-to-day needs and realities, but it’s no coincidence that problems seem to snowball.

The way a lot of our societal structures are set up reflects this.

Instead of working to prevent crime, we punish criminals retroactively. Our country has become so indebted that the shutdown of our government is normalized and many workers endure periods without pay. We go through midlife crises, where only toward the latter half of our lives do we work to amend our dissatisfactions so we don’t leave with unfinished business before our final deadline.

We don’t have the time or ability to fix the real, big-picture problems because we are so busy rushing to finish before the next deadline or next crisis. In all of this confusion, we fail to recognize the root issue behind all of it.

We are kept in a state of perpetual distraction from the real issues that dictate how we live our lives through procrastination. We can never go back in time and amend the decisions of our pasts, yet we are forced to continue our mistakes to get anything done. The cycle continues.

Mitigating procrastination is not impossible, though. 

John Kammeyer-Mueller, an industrial relations professor at the University, said the best way to curb procrastination is to remove as many distractions as possible to fix your brain chemistry.

“Let yourself be bored,” Kammeyer-Mueller said. “Just like flat-out getting used to being bored.… Like if you’re driving someplace, don’t have any music on, don’t have any podcasts on, just get used to having no stimuli for a little bit — which is, again, really hard because there are so many things in our digital culture that make it hard to do that, and we’re not used to doing that. It does seem to be a way to acclimate yourself to not having that constant reward system.”

Procrastination, for all of its difficulty to solve, is not inevitable. It’s not just a behavior but a reflection of one’s struggles to see the bigger picture and move forward. 

While we cannot change the past, we can do our best to work toward a future where we don’t have so much regret and stress. The thing about procrastination is that it’s not only the work we’re avoiding. It’s the rest of our lives. 

Instead of continuing the self-loathing and self-perpetuating cycle, we should all work to spite the entities that stand to benefit from us doing so by stealing time we could be used to actually enjoy ourselves, rest, heal or do quite literally anything else.

As Annie Dillard famously said, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”