"Procrastination and heroic effort at the last minute were the norm."

This may be true, but there are also plenty of students who work from the moment they wake up until the moment they go to bed and still don't have enough time to get all of their assignments done. The problem is that functionally there isn't really any difference between having a 3.5 GPA and a 2.0 GPA, so at some point most people figure out that what they're being asked to do is impossible so they might as well just do their own thing.

Perhaps they should have gone somewhere else where they had time to sleep and think instead of just studying all the time. I know that where I work, the folks who are willing to grind the hardest on assigned work are rarely the ones you turn to for difficult and responsible work. The very best people are the ones who work extremely hard at self-directed work and sometimes push back against assigned work, but they are very, very rare, much rarer than people who are willing to grind day and night on whatever you assign them. The best person for difficult assignments is usually someone who refuses to overwork himself or herself.

I can't agree with this more. However, whenever I refuse to do work I get stamped on the forehead with "lazy". For example, I figure out that the homework in a class is 25% the grade but there are 25 of them, so each is worth 1%. I understand the topic so I figure that it's a waste of my 4 hours to do the work for 1% extra. Bam, "you're so lazy".

Keep dotting your i's and crossing your t's until you're out of school. Honestly, if you're above the work, you should blow through it without too much trouble. It's designed to be doable in a reasonable amount of time for someone who is in the same position as you except that they are just coming to terms with the material. You should be able to do it in half the time. If not, then you benefited from the practice.

Once you're doing real work, turning down work will not make you lazy; it will be an opportunity to say, "Sure, I might be able to assist you with that, but you will have to talk to <important person> and <other important person> about the impact on my work on <important project> and <other important project>."

"Oh... no chance of my project taking priority over those. Shoot, and I really need it done this quarter."

"I think <junior developer> can do the job for you. He might need a little guidance, but if he does, I will be happy to make myself available to answer his questions and point him in the right direction."

"Wonderful, thank you!"

Where does this lazy stamp actually land? Surely your school doesn't actually put a little (* lazy) on your transcript? You seem to know you're not lazy and there's no way the lazy stamp is actually going to be transmitted to anybody who cares, so why do you care?

Good point. I'm not too worried. I'm rather curious as to if I start prioritizing important things that need to be done vs things that can be postponed at work, am I going to suffer? I'm guessing the answer is yes.

Depends whose opinion on importance you're using for prioritization.

If you postpone things that aren't important to you, but are important to your boss, that's not going to go well. If you postpone things your boss doesn't care about, in order to do a better/quicker job on something the boss considers important, that'll probably make your boss happy.

(Note, I'm using "boss" as short-hand for "your boss, and all the other interested parties, customers, etc. who can affect your boss's opinion of you".)

Depends if they are paying you to prioritize. If they're paying you to do what you're told and you don't, that doesn't usually end well. If you're responsible for priorities, you just have to never screw up, that's all.

Just think: Completing a pointless assignment will, by definition, provide zero benefit to anybody. Watching TV also provides little benefit. Hence, completing that assignment is at least as lazy as watching TV.

[Actually watching TV does provide a benefit: it's relaxing. The same is not true for assignments.]

So what if they call you lazy? Are you going to stop getting invited to the parties they are too busy studying to go to?

Personally I found Dartmouth GPAs correlated to how often you went to class and how much attention you paid to the lecture. If you didn't go or zoned out, you'd be working all day and all night just to catch up on that 1 hour you missed.

Scheduling Algorithms for Procrastinators: http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~bender/pub/JoS07-procrastinate.pdf

``We are writing this sentence two days before the deadline. Unfortunately that sentence (and this one) are among the first that we have written. How could we have delayed so much when we have known about this deadline for months? (...)''

That looks like an interesting paper. I'll save it so I can read it later.

It's ``ha ha only serious'', actually. Whimsical style and solid analysis of algorithms you can actually use to schedule your procrastination & work better.

If you want to have a life outside of school (job, side projects, social life) it's very hard to stay ahead of work without losing sleep even with excellent time management.

Certain classes are worse than others and it doesn't usually depend on the content of the course, but the people teaching it. I'd blame the culture of the faculty above the school, although the school likely influences said culture.

Very few Caltech students have jobs.

The faculty contributed from what I could see, but primarily in indulging procrastination by students. It was quite common for students to hand in the majority of a terms problem sets in the last week, and the professors would accept them even if there was a stated class policy that late assignments would not receive credit. (Of course, I acknowledge that this was particularly onerous to me, because I would be the one who then had to grade a full term worth of assignments in a week.)

From my experience as a Caltech undergrad, there was a "tragedy of the commons" in some of the larger classes. A student had a choice of doing the work early entirely on their own, or waiting until their classmates had started working on it, and being able to exchange advice, compare approaches, or verify answers with those classmates. Thus there was a fairly strong dis-incentive to always being the first to dig deeply into an assignment, unless you were so much smarter than your classmates that their cooperation was useless to you.