I was very much this way in school, it worked out okay, but after graduation I did learn from experience that there is a big transition into the workplace around this: as a student deadlines are basically immutable, and your professor doesn't care for updates that you're behind schedule, you just have to figure it out. In the workplace it's the opposite: communicating clearly with your team about progress towards goals or deadlines is really important!<p>As a manager, this is something I make sure to cover/be aware of with more recently graduated hires, as I've noticed many others are just like I was and would tend to just soldier quietly on towards the deadline.
"Student" syndrome? Have they never met a professor? Or most academics? They are the kings of waiting until the last minute.<p>Signed, an academic working on an article that was due last month :)
In the real world, procrastination is bad for many things, but in reality it can save you quite a lot of work.<p>Things that people say or appear to be "important" that are weeks or months away very often turn out to not be so important.<p>In IT, we all have first or second hand stories of absolutely critical deadlines delivered under stress and duress and suddenly upon delivery, management decides they weren't that important.<p>And college courses really don't enable students to get ahead / prework. They do sometimes publish a lecture subject schedule, and maybe now have previous class semesters partially videotaped, but they really are bound to the lecture content of the professor, and the whims of the takehome/homework assigned that day for the next session.<p>So that leads to a work-on-demand for the majority of day-to-day labor in school, with lots of short term high-priority assignments leeching labor from a long term goal, until the long term goal becomes the short term goal, just a harder one.
Like others here, I have used that to (in effect) limit the amount of time I would spend on assignements. If I started "just in time", then I could only spend "just in time" amount of work before turning in the thing, in whatever condition it might be.<p>It's easy to rationalize but in hindsight, it was far from optimal "result for the value of time" (in the sense of financial value of time or time value of money). In particular, multi-tasking from much earlier - still in hindsight - lets you (1) distribute time available in function of difficulty of the project as discovered rather than guessed. And (2) at the cost of a little more time - allows plenty more brainstorming and background thought cycles for not all that much more real time. And (3) allows several drafts for significant improvements in quality (and not much extra real time). And (3) saves massive amounts of stress which is objectively not fun - both stress from having to do a large project at once and stress from the threatening deadline.<p>Delaying was more a response to the work being imposed and not fun (or not the fun part of the project). It did result in less time spent for the result - but that was not the optimal time distribution.<p>Conveying this to current students has - as far as I can tell - always resulted in zero change. I am myself a little better at this by now. A little.
This looks written by someone paid by the word, probably using ChatGPT. It has all the standard signs. Redundancy. Redundancy. Single sentence paragraphs. Pointless differentiation between things that are not meaningfully different. Redundancy.<p>> <i>"For example, a college professor might... Similarly, a manager who..."</i><p>And a turtle could... And a basketball player will... And a movie star may...<p>> <i>"Focus on your goals instead of on your tasks. For example, if you need to work on a task that you find boring, then instead of focusing on the task, try thinking about your goals"</i><p>That is not an example! That is the same sentence again!<p>I hate this future built on charlatanism and wasting other peoples' time.
> The student syndrome is a form of procrastination, because it involves unnecessary delay, which is often unintentional, and which can be expected to cause negative outcomes for those who display it.<p>I'm not convinced it can be expected to cause negative outcomes. It certainly can cause negative outcomes, but I wouldn't say that's my default <i>expectation</i>. I've exhibited the tendency to procrastinate until a deadline looms my entire life. I'm here on HN, doing it right now. But I've never missed that deadline, and would immodestly say the results have always been pretty acceptable to excellent in every case I can recall. I'd rather treat it as a way of approaching prioritization—worthy of study, but not to be treated automatically as a problem except on a case-by-case basis.
I have learned to embrace it. It seems over the years I have developed a pretty good intuition for when it’s time to get going. I have tried to be more proactive and do things early but usually it doesn’t work out.