How to: PROCRASTINATE PRODUCTIVELY

If you are still a student it is probably 'exam season' for you now. Which inevitably means a lot a lot a lot of procrastination. I'm pretty sure everyone does it even if they don't admit to it. The definition of procrastination, for those of you who may not know it, is: 'to put off doing something, especially out of habitual carelessness or laziness' (according to thefreedictionary.com). If you're supposed to be revising or preparing for your exams but are reading this instead, then you are procrastinating.

So the productive part is relatively subjective. I say this because not all of these tasks are that productive nor are they likely to be necessary to be completed at the exact time you are supposed to be working, so technically, not productive. But on the other hand, they kind of are productive because you'll have accomplished something meaningful/worthwhile - er, if you consider these tasks to meet that criteria.

In my own little world, being about to argue that roundabout and somewhat twisted logic means that I'll make a good barrister (lawyer) someday. Feel free to disagree. Most people often do.

So, the key to procrastinating productively is to choose tasks that need completing at some point in time and bring forward the point in time in which you choose to complete them. Here is my list:

 - Tidying my room - this is a big one for me, my room is perpetually messy and every time my mum sees my room she gets angry and starts yelling, so it's very hard for her to tell me off for not working if I'm tidying my room instead so double win;

I bought and built this chest of drawers from
IKEA in the Easter holidays. It was originally
£75 but the day we went there was a promotion
and it was £55. It has two shallow drawers at the
top with 4 more deeper drawers below. I added
some functional decoration on top so it'd look
pretty next to the boring wardrobes.

- Organising small parts of my room - this kind of comes under tidying but sometimes I just shove all my books haphazardly onto my bookshelf or clutter my desk with desk-related items (i.e. spare stationary, random bits of paper, textbooks etc.) so this needs organising at some point and when I get bored or don't feel like tidying I'll sit and make one small part of my room very neat and tidy - as a side note, my mum isn't usually too impressed since collateral damage is that clutter is created in other parts of my room and it's only a small section of my room;

- Washing my hair/hair mask/face mask/painting my nails/tweezing eyebrows/shaving legs - I would classify myself as a girly-girl but I am also very lazy so all of these things can be a bit of a chore to me (my hair is naturally on the drier side so even if I don't wash my hair for a week it won't look greasy or unclean), so sometimes when I don't want to work, I'll take an early shower and spend forever on my hair and legs then come out and do the whole beauty pamper thing - again, my mum isn't very impressed when she walks in and sees me tweezing my eyebrows or painting my nails instead of working but on the plus side I feel so great after I've finished;

- Food/grocery shopping - in the UK supermarkets there are also home sections where you can buy bathroom stuff so that comes under this 'heading', my two brothers will eat pretty much anything except for 'healthy stuff' so I cook all of my own meals and go food shopping with my mum then come home and organise the fridge, I also got the second ensuite so I have to make sure I have shampoo/body wash/ hand soap etc. - my mum can't really say anything about this although I'm quite certain she knows sometimes I just go because I have a shopping problem and I don't feel like working, but on the other hand I think she likes that I'm quite independent so she knows she won't have to worry about me when I'm away at university and after that;

- Clearing out my wardrobe - again, similar theme to the first two except recently a few 'clothes for cash' places have sprung up where I live so that's nice (I'm told the clothes go to charity and from Googling that does seem to be the case but I'm not 100% sure) but I'm a bit of a hoarder and I buy way too many clothes so sometimes (a lot of the time) I'm made to keep half the stuff I wanted to get rid of because it's still so new, I know it's quite wasteful, but I'm a teenage girl who apparently has way too much money;

*on the theme of the 'clothes for cash' I'm sure you know about websites like 'musicMagpie' where you can sell CD's, DVD's, electronics and branded clothing; I've also found a site called 'WeBuyBooks.co.uk' that buys books (duh) CD's and DVD's; and Amazon have a trade-in store for books and games - I've found that for musicMagpie, downloading the app on my iPhone and scanning the barcodes is a lot easier than typing in the code then copying it and pasting it onto the WeBuyBooks search bar to compare the price is the best; it's worth comparing the prices on even a couple of sites since prices can vary by quite a bit so might as well get the highest amount;

- Eating - again, I think most young people do this, and why not? I'm trying to break this habit since I'm trying to tone up and get a nice summer body, I find that in the holidays I measure my day by the time before my next meal because cooking also takes up a significant amount of time, especially when there are a billion vegetables to slice or dice or peel or do something to.

Hope you've found this post amusing and I wish anyone taking exams good luck! Comment below if you have any requests for my next post or just a random comment because you're bored of work :)