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Renaissance Man: Week Five

It’s the Finals countdown, as 1980s Swedish rockers ‘Europe’ might have sung had they been studying at Oxford instead of playing sold-out stadium concerts. Students are procrastinators without peer – apart from of course their peers, who are also very good at procrastinating.

However, there comes a point when one simply hasn’t got the time to procrastinate, as the dread hour of Finals approaches for some of us. What’s the black-belt procrastinator like myself to do? Giving up procrastination suddenly is a dangerous move that can leave you with withdrawal symptoms.

Fortunately, the free market has come up with a solution: simply outsource your procrastination to an overseas worker. There are a number of companies out there which offer this indispensable service.

For as little as £22.50 a day, you can have a dedicated Indian graduate procrastinating on your behalf, allowing you to get on with the work you have to be doing. These procrastinators work in huge procrastination centres, where they’re trained in particular British ways of procrastinating, like making endless cups of tea. It’s not impersonal; I get a daily email update from my current surrogate Sanjeev, telling me all the ways in which he’s wasted his day so I don’t have to.

Customers can choose from a variety of packages, ranging from a simple one-off procrastination for an imminent deadline to a permanent state of procrastination.

Depending on how serious you are about procrastinating, you can also choose to give your surrogate access to your Facebook, where they will regularly post idle statuses and draw up a quick summary of your news feed so you can stay in the loop.

Critics may say that outsourcing procrastination is immoral, on a level with paying for essays from a dodgy company. But it’s simple supply and demand: I want to procrastinate, but I don’t have the time.

So it makes perfect sense to pay a highly skilled graduate to waste their time instead. In fact, they’re probably much more intelligent than me, making the procrastination even more effective.

However, I should warn readers before eagerly signing up to any old procrastination service. The industry ombudsman is currently investigating complaints that some companies shirk their procrastination duties, with staff spending their time studying for part-time qualifications or achieving other useful work. Not Sanjeev though. Last I heard from him, he was rearranging his desk for the seventeenth time that day, while I was hard at work writing this column. Oh… shit.

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