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Scarcity: The Merriam Webster’s dictionary defines it as “a very small supply”. When I think of scarcity I think of food or objects. But there can be a small supply of other things, such as time. In my life time is very scarce, between participating in a sport all year around, having to study, and go to class, there doesn’t seem to be enough time to get everything done. But sometimes when I am given too much time I don’t know how to use it because that doesn’t happen very often. I had a month to do my Hamlet project for my English class, but I put off beginning it until I only had two days to finish. Leaving myself with of time created unnecessary stress, which taught me to not procrastinate.
The Hamlet project was given out at the start of December. I was to make a 20 slide PowerPoint and write essay. It was due two days after winter break, so I had whole month to finish. I didn’t think it would be a time-consuming project because essays aren’t hard for me, I’ve been doing them for years now and PowerPoints have always been a pretty simple task for me as well. The PowerPoint had to be at least 20 slide long, summarizing the whole play. When school let out for winter break I still had not started the project. It seemed simple a small task at the bottom of my “to do list”.
Throughout winter break, I continued to delay starting my project. I did everything but my project: party, shop, go to the movies, etc. My Hamlet project was not on my mind at all.
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When the last day of winter break arrived it finally hit me that my project was due in two days. I wrote the essay as quickly as I could, and stayed up until around 3am working on the PowerPoint. It was more difficult than I had anticipated. As it says in the book, Scarcity, “The experience of scarcity near the deadline often emerges because of how time was managed during abundance”. Even though I finished the project on time and received and A+ it was not my intention to save the project for the last two days before it was due, but I was given was such an abundance of time that I didn’t think the due date would approach as quickly as it did.
Abundance and scarcity have a surprising connection you can quickly go from having an abundance of time to being scarce of time: having to cram all of your work into the last two days, in case. Since I was given a great amount of time to do the project, the deadline didn’t seem urgent would been. A better idea would have been to plan how I was going to use the time to do the project. That way, I wouldn’t have wasted 95% of it. I couldn’t agree more when the authors say that long deadline are recipe for disaster. Having a long period of time to finish something often turns out badly especially when you’re used to being scarce of time.
In Scarcity, the authors uses the word vigilance to mean choices that require us to continuously repeat the choice. I have always procrastinated on my assignments, small and big. Vigilance requires you to continuously repeat a good choice. I lacked vigilance because I never made the choice to get my assignments done on time. In fact, I have always behaved with a complete lack of vigilance when it comes to assignments, and neglected them until the last minute. I was given 30 days to do my Hamlet project, but I chose to do it in two. As I get older and more mature, vigilance is something that I need to instill in my