Our human nature is oriented to postpone duties and tasks to the future. We are driven by the idea of having more time or favorable circumstances to perform the actual task. It’s necessary to take into consideration the side effects or negative aspects of procrastination, especially once you are a nursing student.

Timing is key! Time cannot be negotiated, considering its precious value during nursing studies and clinical practice arrangements.

Procrastination has been studied as a phenomena in different spectrums of life and human nature. When it comes to nursing students, the consequences of procrastination can be dire. Some of them include:

• Inability to generate new ideas
• Wrong evaluation
• Unnecessary pressure, leading to added stress and mistakes
• Time disadvantage in comparison to other students

1. One cannot predict the future

You can manage only the present circumstances. You are not aware on what is going to happen the next day or at any given time in the future. You might judge your workload, but you cannot judge possible future workloads with the same certainty. At the very beginning of the semester it might look like there is plenty of time before exams begin, but this time will pass unbelievably quickly. When a nursing student believes they are overloaded and cannot handle a specific task, a look should be given to the agenda in order to be aware on what the upcoming days, events, and arrangements are.

2. Time constraints prevent creative ideas

Think about what creative thinking means! How could nursing studies be related to creativity in the first place? It might seem as if there is no connection between these two elements, but in fact there is. When you are studying nursing lectures, everything is theoretical and that is why you have to imagine yourself in a given set of conditions and circumstances in order to understand how you would react, what would be your actions and the way you would achieve success. Also, just consider you have just been receiving data on your patients’ conditions and you have to prescribe the relevant drug. It takes time to analyze the data of all possible effective drugs and pick up the most efficient one. This situation might be your next situational case study to be handled. If you do not allocate proper time, you will not have the opportunity to go through all the brainstorming stages and most likely, you will not be succeeding at the end.

3. Wrong evaluation

Usually when procrastination happens, what the nursing students are doing is selecting the task who seems easier to be postponed for a second moment in the future. But, what if the nursing student is not properly evaluating the scale of difficulty of that given task he/she is going to postpone for a second time? Well, failure might be an option in this case. Considering this, the best option would be dealing with the task at the very moment when the first necessity arises. At least, start dealing with it! This way nursing students will grant themselves the opportunity to understand what the task is about and what are the necessary efforts it requires. Procrastination does not allow the necessary tools for evaluating and interpreting correctly these efforts and dedication in terms of timing.

4. Pressure is not one of the most favorable circumstances

In case a nursing student has been assigned a task at a specific time in the present and this task has to be delivered at the end of the week, presumably a one week period would sound like a lot of time.  However, adding to this time all the engagements and arrangements a nursing student goes through amidst lectures and clinical practices, at the end there will not be available free time to dedicate to the postponed task. A nursing student will find him/herself working under pressure. Timing will be his/her top priority during task accomplishment and due to this, he/she will consider compromising with the quality. But, a professor does not evaluate you for the time management or pressure, he/she will evaluate you on the quality of the paper you delivered.

5. Time disadvantage in comparison to other co- students

By procrastinating, a nursing student is taking the risk of being disadvantaged in comparison to the other co-students that have already starting the task in time. Why does this happen? It has been observed that usually the best students practice is starting immediately to work with a specific task without considering the option of procrastination. They prepare a first draft and then develop further revision stages that are usually based upon professors’ opinions and feedback, or even co-students comments.

Once the nursing student does not start the task in time, but decides to postpone it, he/she will not have the opportunity to revise it, gather feedback on it and improve those topics he/she has not properly covered in the paper. These opportunities are granted only to those students that are not procrastinating, working on time and benefiting from sharing opinions and feedback within the predefined period of time.

So what does this all mean?

Taking into consideration how tempting the option of procrastination might be, it is very important for nursing students to be aware of the fact that time is very limited. Also, professors’ feedback has its valuable effect on the task and if you postpone it, you will not have the possibility to allocate time for consulting his/her opinion. A lot of reports and case studies have been shown that procrastination has no beneficial effects even on the emotional aspect of things. It might create the illusion of release at the very first moment you decide to postpone the task, but once you start dealing with it within a shorter period of time, pressure and tension will strike you even harder. Quality will be affected and risk chances will be increased.

We’ve listed the 5 most legitimate and considerable reasons of why procrastination hurts, but for sure all individuals can add even more reasons depending on personal situations and experiences. Truth be told, tasks should be dealt with at the time when assigned. If postponed, nursing students might also lose interest, lose focus, and lose information due to time passing by. In order to achieve the best results by being objectively driven, time management should be considered as a top priority of a nursing student.