Procrastination is the bane of academia, for students and professors alike. I see it in my students every day, but as Dr. Terry Ellis, my former pastor, consistently quoted:

“There is so much good in the worst of us,

And so much bad in the best of us,

That it ill behooves any of us

To find fault with the rest of us.”

And so it is with me, the worst procrastinator of the lot, not a very positive example for my students, nor for my son or daughter for that matter.

A few days more and then I will meet all of my writing deadlines in one fell swoop.

Another cup of coffee, and then I will be ready to answer those emails.

I will wait to prepare my discussion notes until after lunch. There’s still plenty of time before the next class.

Surely, those thank you notes can wait.

I am very good at finding something else to do, other than the job at hand.

Quite simply, I tend to put things off. Even as I write these words I have other writing projects waiting to be completed.

I write off this procrastination to an inner tendency toward perfectionism, but I’m not sure if I agree or disagree with that unknown poet when he or she wrote:

“If a task is once begun

Never leave it till it’s done.

Be the labor great or small,

Do it well or not at all.”

And so despairing that a job will not be done well, I simply put it off for another day, when I can do the thing right.

A big thing must wait until I can really do it justice. Little things don’t matter anyway. Big or little, it’s all the same; surely, the thing can wait.

But then, in the way of things, the little things pile up into a big thing.

I remember reading as a child the Julia Fletcher poem, a rhyme that alerted me, even in my child’s mind, to the fact that little things, taken all together, amount to big things through the tick tock of time:

“Little drops of water,

Little grains of sand,

Make the mighty ocean

And the pleasant land.

Thus the little minutes,

Humble though they be,

Make the mighty ages

Of eternity.”

In the whole scheme of things, it is after all a matter of priorities, I think.

What tasks simply cannot wait?

What, dear student, are the tasks that are so important they simply cannot be ignored this semester?

Your education must be at or near the top of the list. You are, after all, here at Murray State for that purpose, are you not?

Can we slay the dragon of procrastination this semester? I think the monster is all but dead.

Column by Duane Bolin, Professor of history