You’re a senior and have been turning in all your assignments in late since freshman year. You have an assignment due tomorrow morning, but when you finally get home and open your laptop, you see that you only have the title. We can’t count how many times this has happened to us and many others we know. We decided enough is enough and started to seek help for this malady.

We started off by interviewing one of the biggest procrastinators we know, a fellow senior named Kyhym Denny. It was a week before his college essay was due,  and he didn’t have anything to show for it.

He said he put it off because he was “feeling lazy,” and that he’d rather do it in class. But he would go to class and not write anything. Why? He couldn’t decide on what to write about because anything he chose “felt too short.” He knew it was important but just never really got around to doing it.

This isn’t the first time he’s had to go on crunch time either. He said he’s done this for as long as he could remember. That means years of procrastination stopping him from accessing his full potential. So why doesn’t he stop? He said that the reason is, it has never been a problem. On the rare occasion that he gets called out, the sheer number of other people that do it make it seem like “not a big deal.”

Allowing this investigation to be confined to only Connecticut isn’t good journalism so we went out to ask someone who was further away. We interviewed a friend named Dalyce Santana, who lives in San Diego, California.

She agreed that procrastination is a bad habit because it creates distractions from the time that you could be spending on homework. It also creates stress from having to get it done on crunch time. She decided to slowly get rid of it because as she said “procrastination won’t get you anywhere in life.”

We then decided to ask some adults what they think about the entire procrastination situation. The first one we went to was our very own journalism teacher, Jennifer Cummings. She believes that procrastination can and will lower the quality of your work due to rushing through it.

She feels its extremely unhealthy and tries to get her students to avoid doing it as much as possible. She barely procrastinates herself, but if the task is extremely annoying then she’ll put it off a little longer.

Her advice on not procrastinating is to “focus on the goal, and put away distractions… go to a cafe, even just turning off your phone can help.”

The last person who gave us input on how to stop procrastinating, was none other than Francisco’s mother. Of course, she strongly dislikes procrastination and advises against it, but she also freely admitted to procrastinating whenever she wanted because the stress from raising four kids and dealing with other responsibilities. However she doesn’t procrastinate too often because she does know that she has to get work done before anything else, even if she is tired.

The general consensus seems to be that procrastination can be nice for while you’re doing it, but it brings nothing except trouble. So to help stop it within myself, I’ve decided that I’m going to go out to an internet cafe or even just set timers on how long I will allow myself to use my electronics for recreational purposes. And hey, we managed to write this article on time so we have that going for us!