Procrastination is easy to do, especially when you’re a student, because sometimes you just can’t be bothered to get on with the work you should be doing. Instead of going to the library to pick up some books or reading your notes and making an essay plan you simply go out with friends, play sports, watch television or play computer games. None of these will help you get your essay in on time, though, and so you have to knuckle down and avoid any distractions so that you can put all your effort into your essay.

If you continually procrastinate you will find yourself with less time to finish your essay and if you’re not careful you will end up handing your essay in late or handing in an incomplete piece of work to be marked. Either way, you probably won’t get the grades you want or need and so it is up to you to find the motivation you need to sit down and write your essay. If you leave your essay until the last minute you could find that your notes are incomplete and that the books you need to access have been lent out, leaving you in a difficult position.

When you’re rushing around to complete your essay you tend to skip certain necessary stages, such as essay planning, which you think you can do without, but soon come to realise could have been useful. Without an essay plan you may find it hard to stretch out the few notes you have into an essay or you could end up rambling on about issues that are not relevant to the question being asked. There is a good chance your essay won’t be written in a structured way which means you end up jumping from point to point without the argument being presented in a particularly coherent manner.

You will then find yourself struggling for time at the end and when you’re so relieved to reach the word limit you may not bother to read what you’ve written properly. Usually, this results in you handing in an essay that is full of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes which you could have changed without too much difficulty if you’d taken the time to. Maybe you don’t want to read the essay when you know it has fallen far short of your capabilities, as you haven’t given yourself enough time to focus on producing high quality work. You will come to regret this when you receive your grade, though, which is why it is best to get on with your essay than to get into the habit of procrastinating.