A girl like me will do many things in an attempt to procrastinate on something she really needs to be doing. I call this being in “stall mode”. In my case the thing I need to be doing is studying for the GRE that happens to be coming up in less than one month. But instead I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time previewing each WordPress template at least three times, finagling with various custom headers and changing my mind fifty million times. Besides that, I’ve downed a piece of cheesecake, am off and on watching the Colts/Saints game, took the Coopster out a few times, called my fam and have been in rapid fire texting mode with Scout. Who says I don’t know how to multitask?
The thing is, I need to learn to concentrate on one thing at a time and focus people, focus. I am a champion procrastinator. In college I would wait until the night before the big term paper was due and just prepare myself for the inevitable all-nighter. One paper in particular stands out in my mind. It was a ten pager on Cicero of all things and I hadn’t written the first word until about 9:00 pm the night before it was due. I donned my Flashdance sweatshirt, flannel pajama bottoms, fluffy socks and a ponytail and settled in to work with papers, books, highlighters and a laptop spread out all over my bed. My roommate probably wanted to kill me. That night was my first and last experience with NoDoz. Big mistake. About 45 minutes after popping a couple of those, I could not concentrate on anything remotely resembling philosophy, Cicero or otherwise. I think that was the longest night of my life.
Luckily, I work pretty well under the pressure of looming deadlines (minus the NoDoz) and I think I actually got a B on that paper. It wasn’t my best work but it was good enough for me at the time, considering the lack of preparation that went into it. You’d think I would have learned my lesson from episodes like these and I have gotten much better but I still haven’t completely conquered my procrastination tendencies. I think it was Mark Twain who said, “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.”
And so with that, I’ll continue my studies tomorrow. Really I will. Pinky swear.
