“I’ll start immediately. In just a minute. Once I’ve had a snack, made a cup of coffee and done some research on YouTube.” This could be the voice of any student starting a new essay. And I’ll confess, it’s been me several times.
As we snuggle into our winter woollies on the southern side of the equator, or break out the skimpiest bikinis in the north, June is holiday season. We’ve finished studying for a few weeks and it’s time to take a break. This week, we take a break from more serious subjects and turn our attention to the lighter side of essay writing.
The reality
It's 9pm. Your essay is due at noon tomorrow. You've had the document open for four hours and the count reads 47. To make it worse, 23 of those words are your name, the date, module title, and a heading you've rewritten six times. You’ve got a cold cup of coffee and half a packet of biscuits next to your laptop but your essay isn’t growing. Somewhere in another tab, a YouTube video about the migration patterns of the Arctic terns is too fascinating to forego, and this topic you’ve never cared about before seems infinitely more fascinating that the essay you’re supposed to be writing.
You are not alone.
Every student, from the bright-eyed first-year with their fresh year planner to the battle-worn final-year who has seen things, goes through the exact same ritual. Essay writing is not just an academic exercise, it is a deeply spiritual journey through procrastination, self-delusion, and snack-fuelled optimism.
I am not telling you this to warn you. I am telling you this because we’ve all done it. Maybe not the terns. Maybe it was sourdough bread or competitive dog grooming or the entire back catalogue of some obscure documentary series. But the shape of it? Identical. We all do this. Every single one of us. And it's time we talked about it. Today we’re discussing five common excuses we use to justify procrastination but, as they say in those (often annoying) social media posts, “we listen (read) and we don’t judge”. On a positive note, we’ll also check out some helpful tips to get us through the time-honoured tradition of academic self-sabotage.
Act 1: Checking the word count every three minutes
There is something almost meditative about it. You type a sentence, pause, highlight everything, and check. 312 words. You stare at this number with a feeling of betrayal and hope, if you keep staring long enough, with enough conviction, the number will spontaneously increase on its own. It does not.
You type another sentence. Check again. 331 words. Progress, technically speaking.
The word count becomes an emotional barometer, a measure not of how much work has been completed, but of how much suffering remains. Seeing 331 out of 2 500 required words fills the soul with a specific kind of dread that no other experience quite replicates. Then, there’s the advanced tactic of inflating the count. Adding your bibliography. Counting the title. Wondering, briefly, whether the page number qualifies. You know it does not, but you count it anyway.
Helpful tip: hide the word count toolbar until you’ve finished a full section of the paper. The anxiety of watching that number fail to grow never helps. Instead, write first, count later. You’ll be shocked how much further you get when you aren’t constantly monitoring your lack of progress.
Act 2: Rewriting the title instead of the essay
The title is the front door of your essay, and you will renovate that front door 17 times before ever stepping inside the house.
It starts innocently enough. You type a working title, something functional, something that does the job. But then it feels a bit flat, doesn't it? A bit pedestrian? Surely a truly great essay deserves a truly great title. So, you tweak it. You make it more academic. Then you decide academic sounds stuffy, so you make it more conversational. Then you add a colon, because colons feel sophisticated. Then you remove the colon wondering “is that how you use a colon?”
In your head you justify this by thinking “a strong title sets the tone. It frames the argument. It’s the first thing the marker reads, and first impressions matter, so it’s time well spent.” This is what you tell yourself, but it doesn’t help you make the argument you’re trying to reflect in your title. So, 45 minutes later you have a document consisting entirely of a title and your argument still isn’t even in its infancy.
Helpful tip: write “TITLE TBD” in bold at the top of the document and move on. The best titles are written last, when you’ve polished your essay and can write a title which reflects your essay and does the contents justice. Only then can you reflect your argument in a succinct title.·
Act 3: "Researching" by watching YouTube
It begins with genuine academic intent. You need to understand a concept, perhaps something about the French Revolution, or how the kidneys function. You think a quick video will set you up for greater understanding, something viral to make it clearer. This is a legitimate learning strategy endorsed by educational psychologists but, at 9:47pm, it may not be the best use of your time.
The first video is fine. Informative, even. Then YouTube, with the algorithmic generosity of a blackjack dealer who knows exactly what you need, suggests something adjacent. And then something tangentially related. And then something about a man in rural Japan who makes knives by hand, and honestly, you're only watching it because craftsmanship is a metaphor for the kind of focused dedication your essay requires, so this is basically studying.
Two hours later you have watched 11 videos, taken 0 notes, and developed a surprisingly strong opinion on traditional Japanese metallurgy. Your essay remains at 331 words. The Arctic terns are still migrating. The worst part isn't the lost time, it's the next morning when someone asks how the essay is going and you say, "yeah I did loads of research last night". Technically that is not a lie, and yet you still have nothing to show for it.
Helpful tip: If you genuinely learn better through video, keep a notes document or a pad of paper open and jot down one key sentence, per video, summarising what was useful in that video. If you haven’t written anything down after 10 minutes, you're watching TV, not researching. That’s okay but be honest with yourself about it.
Act 4: Changing fonts for motivation
Nobody talks about this one. It happens in silence, in shame, and yet it happens to everyone.
You've been staring at the same 331 words in Times New Roman for so long you start to feel Times New Roman is judging every word you write, every clunky sentence, every comma that might be in the wrong place. It feels like the enemy with its stern, unforgiving countenance. You start thinking, what if I use Georgia? Georgia is warmer. Georgia believes in me. You switch to Georgia and immediately type a sentence you actually like. This is not a coincidence, you think. This is a font that understands what you’re trying to say. But then your progress stalls.
Georgie looks better, but what if there’s a better font waiting for you? You switch to Garamond, which is Georgia but with better posture. You type one more sentence. You try Palatino Linotype on a whim and immediately feel like you're submitting your work to a prestigious journal from 1987. Progress.
The truly committed font-changer will spend over twenty minutes cycling through options, occasionally veering into Comic Sans as a form of emotional self-harm, before arriving back at Times New Roman and accepting that the font was never the problem. You were always the problem. Times New Roman knows this. It has always known this, it is judging you… again.
Helpful tip: Check your school’s or department’s formatting guideline, take note of the allowed fonts ad required sizes and format your document accordingly at the start. Then leave it alone. Your marker doesn’t care which of the suggested fonts you use as long as you use it correctly and consistently.
Act 5: Promising to start properly after one snack
This is the one that gets me every time. I sit down, open the document, and something in my brain fires off a signal that says: “you cannot write on an empty stomach. You need fuel. This is science. Get a snack.”
But… the snack break is not a break. The snack break is a psychological contract you make with yourself. Once you have eaten, you tell yourself, the mind will be clear, the prose will flow, and this essay will write itself in a focused two-hour sprint that future-you will be deeply grateful for.
So, you get a snack. A reasonable snack, nothing excessive. You return to your desk feeling genuinely refreshed and ready. You read back over what you've written. But then, as you go to write down the brilliant thought you’ve just has about the argument, you realise you’re thirsty. You get a drink and notice there are still some of those biscuits left and it would be wasteful to just leave them there. So, you take few and return to your next.
Now you’re settled and ready. You open a new tab to quickly check one source and somehow you’re back on YouTube and the canoe man you saw earlier has started sanding the hull and since this is the most peaceful thing you've ever watched you decide you'll just finish this video, have one more snack and then…
We’ve all been there!
The snack-to-essay ratio is one of the great unspoken disasters of academic life. The snack isn't the problem, not really. The snack is just the physical form of the four-second gap between "I should start" and "I have started," and for some of us that gap stretches into three hours and two bags of crisps and a bowl of cereal at midnight.
The only trick that has ever worked for me, is to just start. Not after the snack. Before the snack. Type one sentence, even a terrible sentence, even a sentence you'll delete tomorrow. Type it, then go get your snack. Leaving an unfinished sentence on the page creates a pull that an empty document never does. You'll come back to finish. I promise, you'll come back.
Helpful tip: employ the Pomodoro Technique which breaks work into 25-minute focused work blocks separated by 5-minute breaks. This boosts your concentration and gives you a reward for staying the course for a set amount of time. It also allows you to take guilt-free breaks, making the writing less tedious and minimising procrastination.
Here is what all this amounts to: you are not lazy, and you are certainly not the only person who has ever found themselves at midnight, 400 words into a 2 500-word essay, watching a YouTube video about knife-making while eating cereal in Garamond font. This is simply the essay experience, in all its chaotic, snack-addled, font-switching glory.
The essay will get written. It always does. Somewhere around 1am, after the YouTube spiral has run its course, the snacks have been depleted, the fonts have all been auditioned and the title has been rewritten one final time, something shifts. The word count climbs past 1 000 and suddenly you’re on a roll and the words come, the argument takes shape, and by 3am you have something that, against all probability, is not terrible.
Future you, handing in that essay with 20 minutes to spare, will feel something close to pride. You earned it. Every procrastinated minute was, in its own way, part of the process.
Now close this blog and turn your attention to the essay at hand. You can check the word count again in three minutes.