Do it Tomorrow | Úna Farrell

   “The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.”― Alan Dean Foster Procrastination: the putting off of things which should be done today until tomorrow. The problem with this is that tomorrow will be today tomorrow and so the vicious cycle begins. There will always, and I mean always, be something better to do than what you should be doing. In sitting down to write this week I found myself putting up Christmas decorations, Googling goldfish names, having a bit of a creep on Facebook, meeting up with old housemates and doing a hundred other non-important things which I decided could not possibly wait until after my deadline!It is too easy to find something more interesting to do than doing work. I have decided that the internet to a student is like a bowl of candy to an obese child. There is no resisting the temptation. One click away from Blackboard is Facebook just waiting for you to log in. The little “F” icon sitting in your bookmarks toolbar waiting for you to click. Taunting you until you finally give in. Then you see that you have notifications, messages even a friend request! After creeping, chatting, putting up the compulsory status declaring that you should in fact be doing an assignment/study you log out. For about ten minutes. Facebook is like a fridge, you check it, see that there’s nothing there but come back ten minutes later to check it again, all the while knowing that nothing will have appeared or changed.Next it’s onto Stumbleupon, Imgur, 9Gag, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube and anything else you can get your grubby little cursor on. There are too many irrelevant pages in the internet for you to ever bore enough to do what you are supposed to be doing. I am a firm believer that time spent on the internet is not equal to time as it is normally measured. While you may think you have only been browsing for about 30 minutes you will soon realise that you have been crouched over your laptop for 2 hours. Realising this we instantly vow to turn it off and open our books, only to find that we need to look up that journal to read and then OMG look another picture of a cat/dog/llama/penguin that looks like a human. Silly animals!Did you know that people afraid of spiders are more likely to find them in the house? Did you know that the space between your wrist and elbow is equal to the size of your foot? Did you know that the Nokia message tone is actually Morse code for S.M.S? Just a few things I’ve learned from my trawling of the internet. Also there are too many baby and cat videos on YouTube. Who am I kidding there will never be enough!Apart from the internet to distract us we have TV, alcohol, food, friends. Why does it seem that every time there is an essay due or an exam to study for that it happens to be the one week everyone else has nothing to do? Pitchers in the New Bar you say? But I have this essay due in less than 24 hours… Everyone is going to be there? I should really read some of the secondary reading though. No, you’re right no one reads the secondary reading anyway. Sure I’ll just get up early and finish it then, it’s only 50% I’ll make up for it in the exam. It’s a downward spiral from here people!