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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!
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.
> In the workplace it's the opposite
except it's not exactly the same - you can't do it the same way and you can't be honest if so. ("I procrastinated until it was almost due, then found a problem, so now we will slip")
Currently in the US it seems there is a trend for (some) professors to accept work for credit even much later than the official deadline. Which kind of kills the "just in time" idea: the student gets to decide when to actually turn it in.
"Student" syndrome? Have they never met a professor? Or most academics? They are the kings of waiting until the last minute.
Signed, an academic working on an article that was due last month :)
I've worked in higher education for decades. I tend to consult on projects that take a year or more to implement.
All of the work gets done in the last three weeks. Every school. Every time.
So true. Every grant application are literally submitted on the last day. Every grant report are written on or after the last day. Every conference paper are submitted on the last day. Every peer review are submitted on or after the deadline.
I only get something done when I'm doing it to procrastinate doing something more important. It can be a viable system most of the time...
In the real world, procrastination is bad for many things, but in reality it can save you quite a lot of work.
Things that people say or appear to be "important" that are weeks or months away very often turn out to not be so important.
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.
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.
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.
> And college courses really don't enable students to get ahead / prework.
It's the other way around. Professors usually pace the work out so the students are always spending some time studying their subject.
The idea of students getting ahead is completely opposite to class-based teaching.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "For example, a college professor might... Similarly, a manager who..."
And a turtle could... And a basketball player will... And a movie star may...
> "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"
That is not an example! That is the same sentence again!
I hate this future built on charlatanism and wasting other peoples' time.
All of the bulleted lists are a strong indicator too. ChatGPT loves bulleted lists.
Also all of the leading sentence adverbs:
> Furthermore, ... (used six times)
> Finally, ... (used three times)
> Accordingly, ... (used three times)
> Overall, ... (used two times)
> Similarly, ... (used six times)
> In addition, ... (used five times)
> For example, ... (used 34 times)
I write like this because starting sentences is hard.
Those leading adverbs are part and parcel and a very common structure lmao
I know, I write that way too. But combined with what BugsJustFindMe pointed out, it smells like it was written by AI. It's all so repetitive and robotic.
> It's all so repetitive and robotic.
Lots of writing is, because generations of people have been trained that "grammatical but formulaic and bland" is the way to write. AI writing is reinforced by the training process, the human trainers were probably trained by they English teachers in a certain way.
That's the consequence of designing a curriculum for ~68-70% of the population.
This also happens to be shaky advice. Focusing on the big goal, when it will take thousands of steps, can be demoralizing, emphasizing the bigness of it. Focusing on just getting the task at hand done today and leavbing to faith that the big goal will work out if we just crank out one task per day is often way less procrastination inducing.
But LLMs are good at generating text, not understanding the implications of what they said.
> 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.
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 expectation. 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.
Indeed. I think an MBA might make analogy to the time value of money concept; the time value of time would state that I'd prefer to have a free hour not working on this project now, than to have the same free hour at a later date.
In the same way a company isn't going to pay out a million dollar financial obligation early, you wouldn't expect a person to perform a 10 hour work obligation early.
And it's relatively easy to think of rational reasons to attach a discount factor to free time later. Certainly on a long enough time horizon future free time is very likely to have no marginal value at all :)
That is a neat, intuitive, framing. Thank you.
You're probably a conscientious person and from "the inside" it maybe feels like you're procrastinating. But taken on your own account, it just looks like you don't actually have a problem with procrastination and are able to prioritize and manage your tasks.
>> [Procrastination] certainly can cause negative outcomes, but I wouldn't say that's my default expectation.
I think that, by default, you have better results with more time, but that doesn't mean inadequate with less. On the other hand, there's a kernel of truth in the witticism: "If you wait until the last minute to do a thing, that thing will take one minute to do".
i would argue it can turn into positive outcomes given the right problem and certain personality. often times, if i start something too early, i end up overdoing it (from the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step). instead i'll background process, hash out an online on the side as merited, and when the time comes knock it out without thinking too hard because you don't have time
for 2 - 3 day trips (personally or professionally) i always pack the morning of a flight after making a list the night before. the one time i actually packed the night before... i nearly forgot my wallet / missed my flight (i didn't)
But wasn't it clear that the "pretty acceptable" would have been far better with extra thought and a few more drafts?
Yeah. I took some classes after completing a chemistry bachelor’s degree to enable me to apply to med school. One was an upper division physiology class. I realized early on that I had written so many lab reports that the two or three hours before the weekly lab was plenty of time for me to write up the previous week’s findings and not only get an A but have the professor single my reports out for excellence. They weren’t that good, by my internal standards, but if it’s good enough for an A, why spend more time on it? It’s not like writing the report really enhanced my learning.
It worked for me, so why not just do it in my midday down time? Class that morning, few hours off, lab in the afternoon. I just scheduled it into time I would have spent goofing off otherwise. Freed up my evenings for more fun things.
Deadline mode: https://youtube.com/watch?v=LcvjE8Apmfc
This isn’t “Student Syndrome”, it’s Parkinson’s Law[0]
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.
Another benefit, in my experience, is that a many of these projects end not being required. So you’re saving effort.
So yes, there is that advantage to the strategy.
In the workplace though, sometimes people will not keep coming back to you for the result - but they will still remember that you did not deliver. Have to be careful about that one. Was it really "not needed", or were you chosen as the convenient reason why it did not happen?