The clicking of the keyboard gets into a rhythm, but then she hears her phone vibrate. She picks it up to check her notifications and the latest posts on Instagram. Before she knows it, it is almost midnight and she still has an entire essay to finish. This is common for high school students because once concentration is broken, it takes an average of 15 minutes to return to work, according to The Guardian.

“Kids choose to make distractions part of their life,” Kim Sweesy, sophomore guidance counselor, said. “Procrastination is a choice of avoidance even though they may not realize it. [Students] are choosing to be distracted by Facebook, a phone or video games versus dealing with reality.”

93 percent of KHS students said they procrastinate, and of those, 85 percent do so often or all the time. According to Andrew Jones, senior, procrastination is not necessarily about not wanting to work, but not knowing where to start.

“I’m not the ‘last day’ person, and not even last minute. I’m the ‘last 30 seconds’ type of person,” Jones said. “[There will] be something small that I could have done, but I don’t want to take [the] time so I do it as late as I can.”

Art by Kathryn Eilert

Not only does procrastination affect productivity, as Caroline Wilson, freshman, said, but it also affects grades. Some teachers take points off for late work, while others will not accept it at all.

“Teachers get bugged with [students], but they shouldn’t because they were teens once, too,” Wilson said. “I don’t really think there’s a way to [avoid procrastination] so they should understand that it is inevitable.”

Procrastination can add stress to an already overwhelming workload, according to Jones. Students put assignments off and have to do them at the last minute and end up stressing themselves out more than  if they had done the work earlier.

“I’ve learned that procrastination is the biggest grade killer,” Jones said. “I could have a good grade, and then I’ll procrastinate on a big project and won’t be able to make it up. I can go from an A to a C really quickly, and it’s hard to bounce back from that.”

Jones said he wishes someone would have told him about the dangers of procrastination before high school so he would have been more prepared. To combat procrastination, Jones recommends that when you hear your phone buzz, turn it off and get back to work because you are going to have to do your work at some point and it might as well be now.

“If you dig a hole, it’s a lot more work to dig out of a hole than to keep up with things as they go along,” Sweesy said. “By procrastinating, [students are] just prolonging whatever [they are] avoiding [but] everything will catch up with you.”