Horizons Online Edition

Issue date: 2/17/10 Section: Final Approach

Do you procrastinate? If you didn't nod, then you are lying. Procrastination plays a big part of our lives and it is not as bad as you think. You procrastinate when you wake up-holding onto every single possible moment of sleep before your parents pour freezing cold water on your head. Some of us even procrastinate in the shower attempting to receive every drop of awakening goodness. Good things do come from procrastination. For example, this piece was created the night before the submission due date at 11:38 p.m.

You do not need a lifetime to create a masterpiece. All you need is creativity and a sense of how long it will take you to do it and when you should start. People say that time management is a problem for you because you procrastinate, but I say procrastination is time management. Let me explain: you spend half your day "brainstorming" your project and spend a quarter of the day deciding on how long it will take to finish, watch television for inspiration for the project, and finally spend the last 35 minutes of the day creating your masterpiece. This is just genius, but people do not understand the logic.

Douglas Adams, for example, was a professional writer who made procrastination into an art form. He was famous for the book "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" which took an eternity to finish. He had all the time in his life to finish his novel, but he was too rich from his other bestsellers to make finishing his novel more important than taking a bath and drinking tea all day. The lesson learned here is that procrastination will determine whether or not you waste energy to make more money or not-because, if you are rich enough to already be happy, why waste your time on something you already have?

A person you would be more familiar with is a guy named Leonardo da Vinci. Just in case you didn't know, he was a scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, and the list goes on. He created many incredible things, but what you didn't know is that he was a huge procrastinator. For example, the Mona Lisa took 20 years to complete. This may be a surprise to you, but not to me. I know that good things take a long time to produce. Referring back to the time management pie, da Vinci spent an exceedingly large amount of time "brainstorming" which allowed him to continually ponder on ways to make his art better. Once again, da Vinci did not spend 20 years creating it-he spent 20 years making it better. If the Mona Lisa was made in only one year, it would not be as special or probably would not even look like a woman at all.

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