So it’s a quarter to midnight, you haven’t written that research paper, or studied for the exam and you are stressed beyond anything the word “stressed” can describe. What do you do? You log on to FarmVille to harvest your blueberries before they blacken into wilted stalks. Wait, WHAT?

There is an obvious lack of logical thinking when students procrastinate their school work to harvest virtual crops that do virtually nothing, except earn a well deserved “F” on that essay.

Funny thing is, with all its detrimental effects, people just can’t stop playing FarmVille. With a membership of 60 million players, this game has become an epidemic that is even worse than the you-coughed-therefore-you-have-swine-flu hype. FarmVille has become such a big deal that there are now statistics such as “FarmVille players outnumber actual farmers in the United States by more than 60 to 1” cited in the New York Times and media coverage on ABC news.

Predictably, the media treats FarmVille as a murderer: it brutally kills all free time and devastates the academic success of students everywhere. True, it takes an unprecedented amount of time to harvest, plow, seed, collect and repeat.

But what this popular Facebook application has done is actually pretty smart. It has managed to tap into the teenage potential inherent in our constant procrastination to bring this trait called “time management” back into our daily lives (and subsequently addict the player and destroy all hope of a social life). The way FarmVille forces the player to calculate their time so that crops will always be grown the next day, plan into the future so there will always be a computer around when the carrots are grown, and commit to a specific time is innovative and even somewhat useful.

Not only does the strategy of time management force FarmVille players to stick to a mental schedule, in order to succeed, but maybe, just maybe, these skills can be improved in real life through habit and association. Maybe the next time a baker bakes a cake, he or she won’t burn it because they remembered that the grapes must be harvested the same time the cake must be taken out of the oven. I’m not suggesting that FarmVille is the way to a bright future, but it’s not just a dark abyss of wasted time. It could actually have beneficial effects.

Of course, it might turn out that FarmVille really is the time-thirsty Dracula that is responsible for a lower-than-acceptable grade, but I believe FarmVille is just an innocent game that will eventually fade out into obscurity sooner or later.

As of right now, it is truly annoying hearing about the crop awards and truffle yielding pigs. However, complainers can probably still remember the SuperPoke wars and bumper sticker exchanges that wasted the precious time of not one, but two people, simultaneously.

There’s a reason those obnoxious trends have disappeared.