Is procrastination intrinsically bad?

pro·cras·ti·nate

v. intr.
To put off doing something, especially out of habitual carelessness or laziness.

v. tr.
To postpone or delay needlessly.

I’ve found myself procrastinating a lot recently. This has generally been regarding my AS Applied IT coursework – I let myself slip so far behind that even thinking about makes the insides of my palms cold and wet.

I exaggerate, but in all seriousness, falling behind is not something that sits well with me. As soon as I see myself slipping I panic, and then something very strange happens: I decide to do nothing about it, and instead procrastinate.

It could be worse, I could just doss. As it happens, during my recent procrastination I have:

• Updated my blogging platform and now have properly drawn-out plans on how to iron out some of the glaring imperfections and other bugs;
• Drawn up a new, workable design for the website of my Young Enterprise group, Viper;
• Started to assemble my portfolio;
• Made preparations to re-immerse myself in the GTD system which in practical terms saved my GCSEs;
• Written this blog post.

I’d probabaly be better off (read: less stressed and more likely to pass AGCE IT) if I had just finished my work; on the other hand, lots of other useful things also got done.

So is procrastination really that bad?

(Yes, it is, because the other 90% of the time I’ve been skulking on Flickr and Facebook)