Procrastination seems to be one of those things that haunts almost everyone. It creeps up on you at the worst times, whether you have that big essay to write, or laundry to do, that just hangs over your head. Some stories are worse than others, and these Redditors can tell you the worst of the worst.
u/Notyourusualbitch asked: What was your worst "s**t I procrastinated for too long" experience?
A gut punch of guilt.
It was my daughters wedding last year. I still feel sick when I think about it. Nothing went too wrong and she was still happy with it but I seriously dropped the ball on getting the decorations ready, the food. For all the planning we had put into it, it was not the glamorous affair it was going to be.
The day of the wedding my brain completely checked out. Only half of what was planned got done. She just celebrated her 1st anniversary and I still can't think about her wedding without getting a gut punch of guilty. I want a do over.
This is a mood.
I had to switch my laundry from the washer to the dryer. I procrastinated it for 12 hours or more.
I have a front loading washer, it spins really fast. Loads come out requiring much less drying time than my old washer. Downside is that things get really compressed and wrinkled, especially when I leave a load in overnight.
I made the mistake of leaving my down comforter in there overnight before drying it. It compressed most of the down into tiny pills and drying it did not reverse the damage. I've washed this thing many times before but I destroyed it this time.
German is HARD!
Right now. As I'm f**king off on Reddit with a German test I have not started studying for occurring in 3 hours and 18 minutes.
EDIT: for the curious, the test went well. Made a few dumb vocabulary mix-ups, but I would estimate my grade between 84-93.
Did this exact same thing in college. Like to the tee including my procrastination being a German test.
I'm pretty sure the only reason I passed German in college is because it was my minor and all the professors were probably so sick of seeing me year after year so my senior year they just passed me so I could get out of their hair.
Oh well it paid off and I sent my final professor flowers and candy for helping me pass that class and hence graduate college.
Definitely overcompensated.
In like grade 6 or 7 when we were doing a unit on probability in math our teacher decided it would be fun to have us all essentially turn the class into a casino so he had us all design games where we weren't allowed to make it rigged so it was impossible to win but the "house" had to win 60% of the time.
It took me forever to come up with a good idea and when I finally did I realized I had procrastinated way too long and I only had 2 nights to finish this project out of the two weeks we had so I completely over compensated.
My dad's a builder so let's just say at a very young age I knew how to use power tools and there was a lot of wood laying around my house. I designed a car racing game that you'd bet on and there were 5 lanes on a wood track about 8 feet long that slopes downhill. I drilled holes in the lanes at the top and there was a board underneath on a hinge that had nails in it. The nails fit through the holes and when you ripped the lower board the nails would retract and release the cars.
The way I accomplished the 60% house win was I hammered 2 of the 5 nails in a little bit farther than the other 3 so those cars would release slightly earlier. I would also mix up the hot wheels cars each time so people wouldn't quite catch on. I had a couple of sports cars and then some heavier ones like a dump truck and a school bus and so the weight difference between the cars gave the illusion of it being completely random.
On presentation day I quickly realized I had completely over engineered this casino game because most other people had just come up with card tricks or some variation on Plinko or Wheel of Fortune.
Senioritis is REAL.
Giphy
I studied for my MCAT a few days ago. Not the 3 months recommended, not even 3 weeks, but 3 days before.
There was also a particularly stupid one in high school that cost me. I was in my senior year and deep in senioritis. I slacked off most in my military history class, putting in the bare amount of effort for an easy A. The class had weekly current event papers due. Really simple things, just write a paragraph about some conflict or new piece of tech being revealed in the world. It had the most lenient late policy ever. You could submit stuff months later for credit.
Well I just got super lazy and didn't hand in 3 months worth of current event papers. I waited until the last minute, as grades were being entered and frozen in the system, to sprint out of my gym class, print them at the library and run over to submit them.
And I couldn't. The teacher had locked in grades literal seconds before I opened the door and was getting ready to leave. From an easy A to a D in minutes, when it didn't need to be. Which messed my GPA and put me toward my safety school for college...
If I ever had the chance to redo high school, that'd be on my bucket list.
That's awful.
Not mine, but it still involves me.
My boyfriend was assigned homework at the beginning of the semester in September that was due before Christmas break in December.
He didn't do it despite me reminding him to over the course of those 3 months and instead waited until my birthday (which is December 13th) to cancel my birthday plans and do homework instead. After he promised to make my birthday "the best one ever" (I don't celebrate my birthday because my parents ruined it for me as a kid and eventually didn't allow me to celebrate it any longer, so it's a very tainted day for me).
I hadn't felt that unimportant in a long time.
Don't do it.
I had a very important 12 page paper to write for school. Had to do a lot of research to do for it, think we got like 2 or 3 months to write it. And my dumb a** didn't want to get started until i actually forced myself to.
A WEEK before we had to turn it in. I slept about 20 hours in that whole week (I wrote down how much I slept on a note in my phone somewhere), going two days without any, while having to go to school and I was actually a few minutes late on the day of the deadline because I was printing out the whole thing that morning.
Little bit of advice: Don't be like me.
That's impressive.
Giphy
Waited till 1.5 hours before the deadline to write an art theory essay for school. Submitted it with 1 minute to spare and went to bed (it was due at midnight that night.)
One week later, I get my grade back:
96%
And this is why I still do art theory as an elective folks.
Oh man.
I've been wanting to apply to this Web Design course for a year. Applications were from May to the end of this month. Procrastinated and applied only in the end of August.
Course has very little spots left now and I may not get in at all. Apparently it was a first come first serve thing. I feel terrible and desperate and I still don't know what I'm gonna do.
Oops.
That one time I had a coding project that I had a month to finish. In the beginning, I was like "there's a month, I can chill a bit this week". And then it was "Three weeks left. That should be enough time. I'll start tomorrow, let's relax today."
And all of a sudden it was only one week left of a month-long project and I hadn't even decided what I was going to code.
The worst kind of surprise.
Giphy
One time a professor emailed us a pdf about 20 pages to read. I thought cool, I can read that on the bus on the way to class that morning.
I open the pdf, and each 'page' was two pages Xeroxed from a book, front and back of each. So all in all it was 80 pages....
That sucks.
The one that comes to mind was college hunting. I was applying to MIT, which requires recommendations from two or three teachers (I remember two, but w/e) as well as some other things. I gave one to the accounting teacher and one to my math teacher. The accounting teacher finished the recommendation reasonably quickly. The math teacher forgot about it until it was too late. I should have recognized he was a piece of garbage, but I also should have been on him to get it done. Waiting till it was too late to ask another teacher crushed me.
I think despondency about not having a real shot at the school I wanted eventually led to my quitting the school I did get in, and everything that's happened since.
Relatable content.
I decided to leave my last class of my degree for an online summer course. I procrastinated it so bad that I withdrew. So I decided to do it online this spring....procrastinated again and withdrew. I talked to my university and I have taken too many semesters off and will have to apply for the program again.
I have a job I love in my field, but f**k this keeps me up at night sometimes. Just one stupid class and I can't seem to do it.
Now THAT'S talent.
Giphy
I walked into a second to last class ready to plan my final project. Only to find the project was due right now and I hadn't started. I said I forgot it at home, ran back, and did it while the class was ongoing and managed to still rock a solid B grade.
Amen.
Second year at university. I partied too hard, didn't do any work, left it too late to catch-up. Had to repeat the year.
Then after working for several years, I went back to get a postgrad qualification, procrastinated the written work too long and didn't complete it on time.
Managed to get extensions beyond extensions while working full time but still kept procrastinating.
After a year I eventually had to hold my hands up and admit I hadn't finished the qualification to my employer and had to leave.
That was the worst time of my life.
Depression is a bitch. Imposter syndrome is a b*tch. Perfectionism is a b*tch.
Try not to follow the bad advice given here, because you don't want to get the results that these guys did.
U/Duckerton375 asked: What's the worst advice someone ever gave you, but you still followed?
The workplace can bring a cornucopia of terrible advice. Don’t follow these unless you want to get fired.
​Bad jobs are usually not worth it.
Stick with a job no matter how bad it is. I stayed with a terrible job working retail, dealing with horrible customers and sexual harassment. I was told I wouldn't find anything better.
"No, no, you misunderstand. I said you wouldn't find anything better at making you feel like complete garbage."
This gets really creepy really fast.
frustrated workplace GIFGiphy"After you put in a job application, you need to call them at least once a day every day until they hire you."
Note: this did not get me hired. It got me called out by the HR person I was calling and forbidden to ever contact their facility again.
I work for a law firm that employees over 1500 people in the home office alone. Once I received a call from the building security saying, "Insert Name is here to speak with the owner." Well we are run by a committee so that's odd. Found out they just applied for a job and wanted to talk directly to the person that would potentially hire them. Told him the firm will contact them to schedule an interview. They refused to leave without "talking to the owner." Had security escort them out of the building.
​This is absolutely not true.
"Sleep is for people who do not want success" great words from my uncle, it almost killed me.
Now I may be oversleeping.
​Interpersonal relationships are also a big breeding ground for terrible advice. Don’t listen to any of these.
Heartbreaking.
My father always tought me and my brother that "having friends is bad and in the end they will never be there for you" so everytime I told my father about my friends he would get kinda mad and give me the advice to stop talking to them.
Now I am afraid of people and have several trust issues, thanks dad.
​This won’t end well.
A Christmas Story GIF by filmeditorGiphyIn the fifth grade my teacher was talking about bullying, then she said "if anyone tries to bully you just agree with them." So the next time I got bullied I agreed with the bully and they bullied me more.
Dude one time I saw an anti bullying video that told the victims to just BE NICE TO THE BULLY. Like the bully was hurling insults and the victim was smiling and complimenting him. My first thought was about how much I hated the mere thought that this would work. My second thought was of how the people who came up with that method had clearly never been bullied.
​Oof.
When I met my now wife at the age of 19, one of my coworkers said that it's very important to start at the bottom with presents and work your way up, she still has the socks I gave her on our first anniversary on the wall over our bed as a reminder...
I'm still trying to teach my boyfriend about good presents and bad presents. Biscuits from the supermarket = bad present. Cheap unbranded laptop battery from China as my only present = bad present (and only lasted 2 months). Anything off my 7-page wishlist = good present. It's literally a list of things I want to receive as presents.
​Can tell you from experience that this is a bad idea.
Had a falling out with some friends. My husband recommended I reach out to an old friend who ghosted me suddenly in a manner that induced some pretty severe abandonment trauma. Went for it anyways because "it's been so long, surely they changed". Am now experiencing the same things as last time.
When you follow bad advice, it can lead to mistakes that you just can’t come back from.​
Buying a house is tricky.
for sale dancing GIF by Lisa VertudachesGiphy"Buy a home now before the prices go up!" -my FIL in 2006.
We bought in 2007 and paid $259,500 for our 1,300 sq ft house (we really couldn't afford it and had an 80/20 so we had 8% interest for one loan and 6% on the other) and in 2008 it was worth $97,000 so refinancing wasn't even an option. We watched all of our neighbors walk away or get foreclosed on but we kept paying our bills and as of this very moment our house is worth $462,000. I'm so happy we stuck it out, we both worked our @sses off and the house will be paid off in 2 years.
It worked out for us, it's a horrible idea. Especially since 1300 sq ft houses are $460+k
My heartbreaks for future generations, I honestly don't know how people are going to afford housing in the future.
It’s there for a reason.
"Never apply for any government assistance."
Cue years of suffering trying to work full-time with a painful disability. Quit a particularly terrible job, and wanted to apply for food aid until I could find another gig; a friend with lots of DHS experience recommended I apply for Social Security "just to get in the system." Turns out my disability was bad enough to get accepted the first time, which I wasn't expecting. Really could've used that support, oh, the 30+ previous years of my life.
Credit is important to have.
I was told to not get a credit card until after college. I was super fortunate to have my college paid for so I had no loans, car paid in cash, no credit card or anything to start building credit. Found myself out in the world at 22 years old with a credit score of 0.
So while a lot of this bad advice came from trusted people, oftentimes they were too misinformed to give that advice in the first place. Don't trust the word of one person--do your research, and make decisions for yourself.
It'll be way better in the long run